The town man only laughed a trifle at this commentary upon the
botanical Latin nomenclature, and once more he was leaning from his
saddle, peering down the aisles of the forest with a smiling,
expectant interest, as if they held for him some enchantment of which
duller mortals have no ken. A brown geode, picked up in the channel of
a summer-dried stream, showed an interior of sparkling quartz crystal,
when a blow had shattered it, which Hite had never suspected, often as
he had seen the rugged spherical stones lying along the banks. All the
rocks had a thought for the stranger, close to his heart and quick on
his tongue, and as Hite, half skeptical, half beguiled, listened, his
suspicion of the man as a "revenuer" began to fade.

"The revenuers ain't up ter no sech l'arnin' ez this," he said to
himself, with a vicarious pride. "The man, though he never war in the
mountings afore, knows ez much about 'em ez ef he hed bodaciously
built 'em. Fairly smelt that thar cave over t' other side the ridge
jes' now, I reckon; else how'd he know 't war thar?"

A certain hollow reverberation beneath the horse's hoofs had caught
his companion's quick ear. "Have you ever been in this cave
hereabout?" he had asked, to Hite's delighted amazement at this
brilliant feat of mental jugglery, as it seemed to him.

Even the ground, when the repetitious woods held no new revelation of
tree or flower, or hazy, flickering insect dandering through the
yellow sunshine and the olive-tinted shadow and the vivid green
foliage, the very ground had a word for him.

"This formation here," he said, leaning from his saddle to watch the
path slipping along beneath his horse's hoofs, like the unwinding of
coils of brown ribbon, "is like that witch-face slope that we saw
awhile ago. It seems to occur at long intervals in patches. You see
down that declivity how little grows, how barren."

The break in the density of the woods served to show the mountains,
blue and purple and bronze, against the horizon; an argosy of white
clouds under full sail; the Cove, shadowy, slumberous, so deep down
below; and the oak leaves above their heads, all dark and sharply
dentated against the blue.

Hite had suddenly drawn in his horse. An eager light was in his eye, a
new idea in his mind. He felt himself on the verge of imminent
discovery.

"Now," said he, lowering his voice mysteriously, and laying his hand
on the bridle of the other's horse,--and so far had the al