w; and whose once rough lines were mellowed by
the patient surgery of a hundred years of plowshares. Gentle slopes, and
shallow valleys, and slopes again--not standing like his graven monsters
of the Cumberlands, but lolling in peace and lazy unconcern, melting
into the azure west so artfully that he could not be definitely sure
where earth left off and sky began. And between these softly molded
forms was no towering harshness at whose contemplation his eyes would
intuitively have narrowed, but a subdued carpet of many fields, with
here and there a nestling home. A grand, sweeping canvas, it might have
been, whose browns of new-turned soil, whose light green tints of reborn
orchards and sprouting wheat, were gracefully interrupted by the deeper
tones of clustered trees--those remnants of primeval forest which the
unintentional landscape gardeners of pioneer days had chanced to leave
standing in this picturesque Kentucky valley.

A welcome seemed to rise from it like soothing fingers laid upon his
brow and his frame drooped in extreme contentment; for it portrayed the
country he had come to seek from his home back in that wilderness where
bridle-paths are boulevards and primitive log cabins the mansions of his
people. So he continued to sit spellbound, held between the
satisfaction of lingering and the impulse to ride down into it, and to
rest there as everything seemed to be resting in a soft growth of
plenty. This was decided by the mare which, of her own accord, turned
and started on.

He did not again draw rein for many miles. The needle of his nature
urged him forward, straight along a narrow valley lane that ambled
between mildewed fences and their inclosed fields; between untouched
walls of wild-grape, red-bud and blossoming dog-wood; and he knew that
his intuition was not sending him astray. This sweet-smelling road was
now making another turn which ushered him directly upon a frame
schoolhouse, set slightly back in a grove of trees. Quickly, he brought
the old mare to a stop.

That it was a schoolhouse--the very schoolhouse which had been the
reliquary of his dreams--he never doubted, so accurately did it fit the
description given by a mountain preacher; and to be actually facing it
in the material form filled him with a nameless fascination. Sitting
rigid, in an attitude bent forward, his tense stare directed on its
partly open door, he suggested a Marathon runner crouched for the start
of that great trial;