that it was wiser to go two yards around than to go one yard
straight through the bull-brier. Young Dodd had a powder-horn slung from
his shoulder that morning, and the powder-horn had some carving on it,
but it was not like the carving on old Pelatiah's horn. There was a
letter R, cut with many flourishes, a letter L cut but wanting most of
its flourishes, and a letter D half finished, and crooked at that, and
without the first trace of a flourish. That was the way his powder-horn
looked that day, for that was the way it looked when he died, and his
son sold it to a dealer in antiquities.

Young Dodd and his wife found it lonely living up there on the hilltop.
They were the first who had pushed so far back from the river and the
town. Mrs. Dodd, who had an active and ambitious spirit in her, often
reproached her husband for his neglect to make their home more
accessible to her old friends in the distant town.

"If you'd take a bill-hook," she would say, "and clean up that
snake-fence path of yours a little, may be folks would climb up here to
see us once in a blue moon. It's all well enough for you with your
breeches, but how are women folks to trail their frocks through that
brush?"

Reub Levi would promise and promise, and once he did take his hook and
chop out a hundred yards or so. But things did not mend until Big Bill
Turnbull, known all over the county as the Hard Job Man, married a widow
with five children, bought a little patch of five or six acres next to
Dodd's big farm, built a log-cabin for himself and his family, and
settled down there.

Now Turnbull's log-cabin was so situated that the line of old Pelatiah's
path through the bull-brier, extended about an eighth of a mile, would
just reach the front-door. Turnbull saw this, and it was at that point
that he tapped Reub Levi's foot-path to the town. But he did his tapping
after his own fashion. He took his wife's red flannel petticoat and tied
it to a sapling on the top of the mound that the old hunter used to
climb, and then with bill-hook and axe he cut a straight swath through
the woods. He even cut down through the roots and took out the larger
stones.

"That's what you'd ought to have done long ago, Reuben Levi Dodd," said
his wife, as she watched this manifestation of energy.

"Guess I didn't lose much by waiting," Reub Levi answered, with a smile
that did not look as self-satisfied as he tried to make it. "I'd a-had
to do it myself, and now t