ulders.
Somewhere within him was the sense of kinship with the wilderness that
has become atavistic in Americans of six or eight generations on the
soil. It was like skipping two centuries and getting back where life was
primitive from necessity. There were few if any complications here, nor
were there subtleties to consider. As far back as he knew anything of
his Thorley ancestors, they had hewed and hacked and delved and tilled
on and about this hillside, getting their changes from its seasons,
their food from its products, their science from its bird-life and
beast-life, their arts and their simples, their dyes and their drinks
from its roots and juices. To the extent that men and the primeval could
be one, they had been one with the forest of which nothing but this
upland sweep remained, treating it as both friend and enemy. As enemy
they had felled it; as friend they had lived its life and loved it,
transmitting their love to this son, who was now bringing his
heartaches, as he was accustomed also to bring his joys, where they had
brought their own.

The advantage of the wood to Thor was that once within its shadows he
could, to some degree, stop thinking of the life outside. He could give
his first attention to the sounds and phenomena about him. As he stood
now, listening to the resonant tapping of a hairy woodpecker on a dead
tree-trunk he could forget that the world held a Lois, a Rosie, and a
Claude, each a storm-center of emotions. It was a respite from
emotions--in a measure, a respite from himself. He stepped craftily,
following the sound of the woodpecker's tap till he had the satisfaction
of seeing a black-and-white back, with a red band across the busily
bobbing head. He stopped again to watch a chipmunk who was more sharply
watching him. The little fellow, red-brown and striped, sat cocked on a
stone, his fore paws crossed on his white breast like the hands of a
meek saint at prayer. Strolling on again, he paused from time to
time--to listen to a robin singing right overhead, or to catch the
liquid, spiritual chant of a hermit-thrush in some stiller thicket of
the wood, or to watch a bluebird fly directly into its nest, probably an
abandoned woodpecker's hole, in a decaying Norway pine. These small
happenings soothed him. Sauntering and pausing, he came up to the high,
treeless ridge he had last visited on the day he asked Lois to marry
him.

The ridge broke sharply downward to a stretch of undulating