upon him as he sat
upon a stump and drank in the beauty of it all.

After a time his ear, becoming attuned to the multitudinous voices
of the wood, descried the silvery note of falling water. He arose and
traced the sound.

Less than twenty yards away, and not far from the bluff, a vigorous
rivulet started from beneath the half-bared roots of a monster beech,
and fell over an outcropping boulder into a pool so clear that sand
on its bottom, worked mysteriously into a pattern by the action of the
water, lay revealed.

Hiram knelt on a mossy rock beside the pool, and bending put his lips
to the water. It was the sweetest, most satisfying drink, he had imbibed
for many a day.

But the morning was growing old, and Hiram wanted to trace the farther
line of the farm. He went down to the river, crossed the open meadow
again where they had built the campfire the morning before, and found
the deeply scarred oak which stood exactly on the boundary line between
the Atterson and Darrell tracts.

He turned to the north, and followed the line as nearly as might be. The
Darrell tract was entirely wooded, and when he reached the uplands
he kept on in the shadowy aisles of the sap-pines which covered his
neighbor's property.

He came finally to where the ground fell away again, and the yellow,
deeply-rutted road lay at his feet. The winter had played havoc with the
automobile track.

The highway was unfenced and the bank dropped fifteen feet to the beaten
path. A leaning oak overhung the road and Hiram lingered here, lying
on its broad trunk, face upward, with his hat pulled over his eyes to
shield them from the sunlight which filtered through the branches.

This land hereabout was beautiful. The boy could appreciate the beauty
as well as the utility of the soil. It was so pleasing to the eye that
he wished with all his heart it had been his own land he had surveyed.

"And I'll not be a tenant farmer all my life, nor a farm-foreman, as
father was," determined the boy. "I'll get ahead. If I work for the
benefit of other people for a few years, surely I'll win the chance in
time to at last work for myself."

In the midst of his ruminations a sound broke upon his ear--a jarring
note in the peaceful murmur of the woodland life. It was the thud of a
horse's hoofs.

Not the sedate tunk-tunk of iron-shod feet on the damp earth, but
an erratic and rapid pounding of hoof-beats which came on with such
startling swiftness that Hiram