xclaimed both women in a breath.

"Thar ain't no law in heaven or yearth ez kin gin an' honest man what
ain't his'n by rights," he declared.

An insistent feminine clamor arose, protesting the sovereign power
of the law. He quaked for a moment; dominant though he was in his own
house, he could not face them, but he could flee. He suddenly stepped
out of the door, and when they opened it and looked after him in the
snowy dusk and the whitened woods, he was gone.

And popular opinion coincided with them when it became known that he had
formally relinquished his right to that portion of the land improved
by Grinnell. He said to the old squire who drew up the quit-claim deed,
which he executed that Christmas Eve, that he was not willing to profit
by his enemy's mistake, and thus the consideration expressed in the
conveyance was the value of the land, considered not as a farm, but as
so many acres of wilderness before an axe was laid to the trunk of a
tree or the soil upturned by a plough. It was the minimum of value, and
Grinnell came cheaply off.

The blacksmith, the mountain fiddler, and the advanced thinker, who had
been active in the survey, balked of the expected excitement attendant
upon the ousting of Grinnell, and some sensational culmination of the
ancient feud, were not in sympathy with the pacific result, and spoke as
if they had given themselves to unrequited labors.

"Thar ain't no way o' settlin' what that thar critter Purdee owns
'ceptin' ez consarns Moses' tables o' the Law. He clings ter them," they
said, in conclave about the forge fire when the big doors were closed
and the snow, banking up the crevices, kept out the wind. "There ain't
no use in percessionin' Purdee's land."

And indeed Purdee's possessions were wider far than even that divergent
line which the county surveyor ran out might seem to warrant; for on
the mountain-tops largest realms of solemn thought were open to him. He
levied tribute upon the liberties of an enthused imagination. He exulted
in the freedom of the expanding spaces of a spiritual perception of the
spiritual things. When the snow slipped away from the tables of the Law,
the man who had read strange scripture engraven thereon took his way one
day, doubtful, but faltering with hope, up and up to the vast dome of
the mountain, and knelt beside the rocks to see if perchance he might
trace anew those mystic runes which he once had some fine instinct to
decipher. And as he pon