ame out to play.

Summer and autumn slipped away; the winter passed; spring came,
with all the wonder of the resurrection of flower and leaf and
blade. So peace and quiet came again into the shepherd's life.
When no answer to his letter was received, and the doctor did not
return as he had promised, the old man knew that the last link
connecting him with the world was broken.

CHAPTER XLIV.

THE TRAIL ON THE SUNLIT HILLS.

When Young Matt first knew that Sammy had sent Ollie back to the
city with no promise to follow, he took to the woods, and returned
only after miles of tramping over the wildest, roughest part of
the country. The big fellow said no word, but on his face was a
look that his father understood, and the old mountaineer felt his
own blood move more quickly at the sight.

But when Sammy with her books was fully established in the
Matthews home, and Young Matt seemed always, as the weeks went by,
to find her reading things that he could not understand, he was
made to realize more fully what her studies with the shepherd
meant. He came to feel that she had already crossed the threshold
into that world where Mr. Howitt lived. And, thinking that he
himself could never enter, he grew lonely and afraid.

With the quickness that was so marked in her character, Sammy
grasped the meaning of his trouble almost before Young Matt
himself knew fully what it was. Then the girl, with much care and
tact, set about helping him to see the truths which the shepherd
had revealed to her.

All through the summer and fall, when the day's work was done, or
on a Sunday afternoon, they were together, and gradually the woods
and the hills, with all the wild life that is in them, began to
have for the young man a new meaning; or, rather, he learned
little by little to read the message that lay on the open pages;
first a word here and there, then sentences, then paragraphs, and
soon he was reading alone, as he tramped the hills for stray
stock, or worked in the mountain field. The idle days of winter
and the long evenings were spent in reading aloud from the books
that had come to mean most to her.

So she led him on slowly, along the way that her teacher had
pointed out to her, but always as they went, he saw her going
before, far ahead, and he knew that in the things that men call
education, he could never hope to stand by her side. But he was
beginning to ask, are there not after all things that lie still
deep