knew them all,--and there, with the sons and hired men,
pitch quoits in the road before the house.

Quoits is still a game of farmers' sons, and the horseshoe is superior
to the quoit of commerce and the town. The open side affords facility
for aggressive feats of cleverness in displacing an opponent's cast,
and the corks upon the shoes reduce some sliding chances, and the game
has quality. And Harlson found rather a distraction in the contests.
He found, maybe, distraction, too, in chatting with slim Jenny Bierce,
who was a very little girl when he was in the country school, but who
had grown into almost a woman, and who was a trifle more refined,
perhaps, than most of her associates. She had a sweetheart, a stalwart
young farmer named Harrison Woodell, one of the schoolmates of
Harlson's early youth, but she liked to talk with Harlson. He was
different from her own lover; no better, of course, but he had lived
another life, and could tell her many things.

And Woodell, who expected to marry her, glowered a little. She did not
care for that. Grant Harlson had not noticed it.

But neither quoits nor Jenny Bierce sufficed at all times for
forgetfulness. Harlson was in the grasp of that enemy--or friend--who
gives vast problems, and with them no solution. He could not rest. He
read his Bible, but that only puzzled him the more, because there
seemed to him, of necessity, degrees of wrong, and he could not find a
commandment which was flexible. He chafed because there was no measure
for his sentence.

A pebble at the rivulet's head will turn the tiny current either way,
and so change the course of eventual creek and river. The pebble fell
near the source in Grant Harlson's case, for never before in his life
had he studied much the moral problem. His had been the conventional
training, which is to-day the training which asks one to accept,
unreasoning, the belief of yielding predecessors, and, until he felt
the prick of conscience, he had never cared to question the
inheritance. Now he wanted proof. If he could not plead not guilty,
might he not, at least, find weakness in the law? Then fell the pebble.

It was only a country newspaper, and it was only the chance verses
clipped from some unknown source which turned the tide that might have
grown yet have run forever between narrow banks.

For the verses--who wrote them?--were those of that brief poem which
has made more doubters than any single revelatio