eir own country I'd pay my mite to help them along. I think I owe it
to them--even though as far as I know I haven't a forbear that ever did
them wrong. Trouble is, don't any of them want to go back! You couldn't
scare them worse than to tell them you were going to help them back to
their fatherland! The Lauderdale negroes, for instance--never see one
that he isn't laughing! And Tullius at Three Oaks,--_he'd_ say he
couldn't possibly think of going--must stay at Three Oaks and look after
Miss Margaret and the children! No, it isn't an easy subject, look at it
any way you will. But as between us and the North, it ain't the main
subject of quarrel--not by a long shot it ain't! The quarrel's that a
man wants to take all the grist, mine as well as his, and grind it in
his mill! Well, I won't let him--that's all. And here's your road to
Thunder Run."

Allan strode on alone over the frozen hills. Before him sprang the
rampart of the mountains, magnificently drawn against the eastern sky.
To either hand lay the fallow fields, rolled the brown hills, rose the
shadowy bulk of forest trees, showed the green of winter wheat. The
evening was cold, but without wind and soundless. The birds had flown
south, the cattle were stalled, the sheep folded. There was only the
earth, field and hill and mountain, the up and down of a narrow road,
and the glimmer of a distant stream. The sunset had been red, and it
left a colour that flared to the zenith.

The young man, tall, blond, with grey-blue eyes and short, fair beard,
covered with long strides the frozen road. It led him over a lofty hill
whose summit commanded a wide prospect. Allan, reaching this height,
hesitated a moment, then crossed to a grey zigzag of rail fence, and,
leaning his arms upon it, looked forth over hill and vale, forest and
stream. The afterglow was upon the land. He looked at the mountains, the
great mountains, long and clean of line as the marching rollers of a
giant sea, not split or jagged, but even, unbroken, and old, old, the
oldest almost in the world. Now the ancient forest clothed them, while
they were given, by some constant trick of the light, the distant,
dreamy blue from which they took their name. The Blue Ridge--the Blue
Ridge--and then the hills and the valleys, and all the rushing creeks,
and the grandeur of the trees, and to the east, steel clear between the
sycamores and the willows, the river--the upper reaches of the river
James.

The glow dee