m a race which had gone to seed like plants in a
long-abandoned garden, once splendid and vigorous, old Caleb Harper was
a patriarchal figure nearing the sunset of his life.

His forebears had been mountaineers of the Kentucky Cumberlands since
the vanguard of white life had ventured westward from the seaboard. From
pioneers who had led the march of progress that stock had relapsed into
the decay of mountain-hedged isolation and feudal lawlessness, but here
and there among the wastage, like survivors over the weed-choked garden
of neglect, emerged such exceptions as Old Caleb; paradoxes of rudeness
and dignity, of bigotry and nobility.

Caleb's house stood on the rising ground above the river, a substantial
structure grown by occasional additions from the nucleus that his
ancestor Caleb Parish had founded in revolutionary times, and it marked
a contrast with its less provident neighbours. Many cabins scattered
along these slopes were dismal and makeshift abodes which appeared to
proclaim the despair and squalor of their builders and occupants.

Just now a young girl stood in the large unfurnished room that served
the house as an attic--and she held a folded paper in her hand.

She had drawn out of its dusty corner a small and quaintly shaped
horsehide trunk upon which, in spots, the hair still adhered. The
storage-room that could furnish forth its mate must be one whose
proprietors held inviolate relics of long-gone days, for its like has
not been made since the life of America was slenderly strung along the
Atlantic seaboard and the bison ranged about his salt licks east of the
Mississippi.

Into the lock the girl fitted a cumbersome brass key and then for a long
minute she stood there breathing the forenoon air that eddied in
currents of fresh warmth. The June sunlight came, too, in a golden flood
and the soft radiance of it played upon her hair and cheeks.

Outside, almost brushing the eaves with the plumes of its farthest flung
branches, stood a gigantic walnut tree whose fresh leafage filtered a
mottling of sunlight upon the age-tempered walls.

The girl herself, in her red dress, was slim and colourful enough and
dewy-fresh enough to endure the searching illumination of the June
morning.

Dark hair crowned the head that she threw back to gaze upward into the
venerable branches of the tree, and her eyes were as dark as her hair
and as deep as a soft night sky.

Over beetling summits and sunlit valley the