moved from such influence. To my mind environment
is strong as heredity, quite as strong. It destroys the old and
creates the new. However, environment and heredity worked together up
there. In my day--to continue--the Raynier family was larger than
usual. The last wife still lived, a miserable cowed creature, white as
ashes, face and hair and bleached scared eyes, eyes that looked as if
they saw phantoms rather than people. Her mind was partially gone. I
was a famous mountaineer then, and climbing wherever foot of man had
been before, I once in a while came upon some or other of that family,
and sometimes paused at the door, where I had first to teach the
bloodhounds a lesson. I never entered the filthy place but once. There
were two sons and a daughter. Oh, how immortally beautiful that girl
was! Such velvet darkness in the eye, such statuesque lines, such
rose-leaf color, such hair--'hair like the thistle-down tinted with
gold,' as John Mills, the Scotch poet-player, sang. The old man
Raynier worshipped her, perhaps as a wild beast loves its whelp. But
he had all sorts of fanciful names for her, Heart's-ease and Heart's
Delight, and Violet and Rose and Lily. He grew almost gentle when he
spoke to her; and he never knew that she was feeble-minded. She just
missed being an imbecile. Perhaps you would not have known that all
at once; you might not have found it out at all only meeting her
casually. The old man Raynier sent her down to school--the first that
had ever been there: she could never learn to read. She could not
always tell her name. Still, her mind was innocent--perhaps because it
was a blank. I have sometimes thought that blank mind of hers may have
been a dead-wall through which the vices of her forebears could not
pass, and so her children, if she had them, may have escaped the
inheritance, and found a chance for good again, as if crime should at
last estop itself. That may be."

"Oh, I think this is terrible!" I said, as we turned again in our
walk. "Make haste, please, and be through."

"Yes, it is. But I would show you that life can be anything but
commonplace in this wilderness. Well, blank or not, she had a lover,
who had found her out in his sketching rambles, a young painter from
some distant parts, and the first boarder I ever had, by the way. And
all the Rayniers swore they would have his life sooner than he should
have her. One day I had been hunting on old Mount Sorrow, as it
happened; there h