at was said about the wild
mountain lands which formed the greater portion of his patrimony--that
they were practically valueless--was true, ere he gave up all hope of
profiting from them.

The building of the railroad through the valley had imbued him with some
hope that they might not prove to be as useless as they had been thought
to be, and it had been that which had induced him, at the start, to make
the journey.

Once arrived he had found the mountain air delightful, the fishing fine,
the shooting all that could be wished, and had enjoyed these to their
full, investigating, meanwhile, his rough property; but as he lay there
in his shack of logs and puncheons he acknowledged to himself that it
was none of these things which now made the mountains so attractive. It
was the nymph of the woods pool, the mountain-side Europa on her bull,
his little pupil of the alphabet, in plain reality, who now held him to
the wilderness.

He wondered just what this could mean. Could it be possible that he was
thinking seriously of the little maid _in that way_?

He almost laughed at the idea, there alone in the woods cabin, with the
stars in their deep velvet canopy twinkling through the window at him
and the glow of his cob pipe for company.

But his laugh was not too genuine. He found himself, to his amazement,
comparing Madge, the mountain girl, with Barbara Holton, the elegant
daughter of the lowlands, and finding many points in favor of the little
rustic maiden. He wondered just how serious his attentions to fair
Barbara had been thought to be by her, her father, Horace Holton, and by
other people. There were many things about Madge Brierly, which, as he
sat there, reflective, he found admirable, besides her vivid, vigorous
young beauty. He could not bring himself, as he sat thinking of the two
girls, widely separated as they were in the great social plane, unevenly
matched as they had been in early training, to admit that the whole
advantage was upon the side of Barbara Holton.

And above him, in her lonely little cabin on the towering rock, upon all
sides of which the mountain-torrent, making it an isle of safety for her
there in the wilderness, roared rythmically, the mountain maiden who so
occupied his thoughts was busy with her crude wardrobe.

In complete dissatisfaction she put aside, at length, every garment of
her own which she possessed as unsuitable for the great day when she was
to meet the bluegrass gentlef