side, lifted far above Sunday lessons and soul conflicts and
perplexing questions that hung answerless in a person's mind, was a
place where the cedars smelled sweet and the west wind from the "other
mountain" plashed cool in your face what time a sun-smitten Paradise
Valley was like an oven. It would be three good hours before he would
have to go after Nance Jane; and the Sunday lesson--but he had already
forgotten about the Sunday lesson.

Three-quarters of the first hour were gone, and he was warm and thirsty
when he topped the last of the densely-wooded lower slopes and came out
on a high, rock-strewn terrace thinly set with mountain cedars. Here his
feet were on familiar ground, and a little farther on, poised on the
very edge of the terrace and overtopping the tallest trees of the lower
slopes, was the great, square sandstone boulder which was his present
Mecca.

On its outward face the big rock, gray, lichened and weather-worn, was a
miniature cliff as high as the second story of a house; and at this
cliff's foot was a dripping spring with a deep, crystalline pool for its
basin. There was a time when Thomas Jefferson used to lie flat on his
stomach and quench his thirst with his face thrust into the pool. But
that was when he had got no farther than the Book of Joshua in his
daily-chapter reading of the Bible. Now he was past Judges, so he knelt
and drank from his hands, like the men of Gideon's chosen three hundred.

His thirst assuaged, he ascended the slope of the terrace to a height
whence the flat top of the cubical boulder could be reached by the help
of a low-branching tree. The summit of the great rock was one of the
sacred places in the temple of the solitudes; and when the earth became
too thickly peopled for comfort, he would come hither to lie on the very
brink of the cliff overhanging the spring, heels in air, and hands for a
chin-rest, looking down on a removed world mapping itself in softened
outlines near and far.

Men spoke of Paradise as "the valley," though it was rather a sheltered
cove with Mount Lebanon for its background and a semicircular range of
oak-grown hills for its other rampart. Splitting it endwise ran the
white streak of the pike, macadamized from the hill quarry which, a full
quarter of a century before the Civil War, had furnished the stone for
the Dabney manor-house; and paralleling the road unevenly lay a ribbon
of silver, known to less poetic souls than Thomas Jefferson's