nd a few crippled grasshoppers deluded themselves into the belief that
the summer still lingered. Once the puppy tripped over a love-vine,
and getting his front paws painfully entangled yelped sharply for
assistance. Picking him up, Abel carried him in his arms to the pine
wood, where he place him on a bed of needles in a hollow.

Through the slender boles of the trees, the sunlight fell in bars on
the carpet of pine-cones. The scent of the living forest was in his
nostrils, and when he threw back his head, it seemed to him that the
blue sky was resting upon the tree-tops. Taking off his coat, he felt
the edge of his blade, while he leaned against the great pine he had
marked out for sacrifice. In the midst of the wood he saw the walls of
his house rising--saw the sun on the threshold--the smoke mount from
the chimney. The dream in his brain was the dream of the race in its
beginning--for he saw the home and in the centre of the home he saw a
woman and in the arms of the woman he saw a child. Though the man would
change, the dream was indestructible, and would flow on from the future
into the future. The end it served was not individual, but racial--for
it belonged not to the soul of the lover, but to the integral structure
of life.

Moving suddenly, as if in response to a joyous impulse, he drew away
from the tree, and lifting his axe swung it out into the sunlight. For
an instant there was silence. Then a shiver shook the pine from its
roots upward, the boughs rocked in the blue sky, and a bird flying out
of them sailed slowly into the west.

CHAPTER XIV

SHOWS THE WEAKNESS IN STRENGTH

When Abel had gone, Sarah folded her grey woollen shawl over her bosom,
and ordered the boy with the wheelbarrow to return to the barnyard. Left
alone her eyes followed her son's figure as it divided the broomsedge in
the meadow, but from the indifference of her look she might have gazed
on the pine tree toward which he was moving. A little later, when her
glance passed to the roof of the mill there was no perceptible change in
her expression; and she observed dispassionately that the shingles which
caught the drippings from the sycamore were beginning to rot. While she
stood there she was in the throes of one of the bitterest sorrows of
her life; yet there was no hint of it either in her quiet face or in the
rigid spareness of her figure. Her sons had resisted her at times, but
until to-day not one of them had rebelled op