his head.

"I s'pose likely you'll be startin' aout to travel and see foreign parts,
same's you've always planned, won't you--or maybe you cal'late you be too
old now?"

Jehiel gave no indication that he had heard. His faded old blue eyes were
fixed steadily on the single crack in the rampart of mountains, through
which the afternoon train was just now leaving the valley. Its whistle
echoed back hollowly, as it fled away from the prison walls into the great
world.

The neighbor stiffened in offended pride. "I bid you good-night, Mr.
Hawthorn," he said severely, and stumped down the steep, narrow road
leading to the highway in the valley.

After he had disappeared Jehiel turned to the tree and leaned his forehead
against it. He was so still he seemed a part of the great pine. He stood
so till the piercing chill of evening chilled him through, and when he
looked again about him it was after he had lived his life all through in a
brief and bitter review.

It began with the tree and it ended with the tree, and in spite of the
fever of unrest in his heart it was as stationary as any rooted creature
of the woods. When he was eleven and his father went away to the Civil
War, he had watched him out of sight with no sorrow, only a burning envy
of the wanderings that lay before the soldier. A little later, when it was
decided that he should go to stay with his married sister, since she was
left alone by her husband's departure to the war, he turned his back on
his home with none of a child's usual reluctance, but with an eager
delight in the day-long drive to the other end of the valley. That was the
longest journey he had ever taken, the man of almost three-score thought,
with an aching resentment against Fate.

Still, those years with his sister, filled with labor beyond his age as
they were, had been the happiest of his life. In an almost complete
isolation the two had toiled together five years, the most impressionable
of his life; and all his affection centered on the silent, loving, always
comprehending sister. His own father and mother grew to seem far away and
alien, and his sister came to be like a part of himself. To her alone of
all living souls had he spoken freely of his passion for adventuring far
from home, which devoured, his boy-soul. He was six-teen when her husband
finally came back from the war, and he had no secrets from the young
matron of twenty-six, who listened with such wide tender eyes of sympathy