ttle city stands will this same wood-cutter's name
and history stand also. He had camped where it stood now, when nothing
was there save the wild duck in the reeds, the antelopes upon the hills,
and all manner of furred and feathered things; and it all was his. He
had seen the yellow flashes of gold in the stream called Pipi, and he
had not gathered it, for his life was simple, and he was young enough
to cherish in his heart the love of the open world, beyond the desire of
cities and the stir of the market-place. In those days there was not
a line in his face, not an angle in his body--all smoothly rounded and
lithe and alert, like him that was called "the young lion of Dedan." Day
by day he drank in the wisdom of the hills and the valleys, and he wrote
upon the dried barks of trees the thoughts that came as he lay upon the
bearskin in his tent, or cooled his hands and feet, of a hot summer day,
in the moist sandy earth, and watched the master of the deer lead his
cohorts down the passes of the hills.

But by-and-by mule-trains began to crawl along the ledges of Margath
Mountain, and over Shaknon came adventurers, and after them, wandering
men seeking a new home, women and children coming also. But when these
came he had passed the spring-time of his years, and had grown fixed in
the love of the valley, where his sole visitors had been passing tribes
of Indians, who knew his moods and trespassed not at all on his domain.
The adventurers hungered for the gold in the rivers, and they made it
one long washing-trough, where the disease that afflicted them passed on
from man to man like poison down a sewer. Then the little city grew, and
with the search for gold came other seekings and findings and toilings,
and men who came as one stops at an inn to feed, stayed to make their
home, and women made the valley cheerful, and children were born, and
the pride of the place was as great as that of some village of the
crimson East, where every man has ancestors to Mahomet and beyond.

And he, Felion, who had been lord and master of the valley, worked with
them, but did not seek for riches, and more often drew away into the
hills to find some newer place unspoiled by man. But again and again he
returned; for no fire is like the old fire, and no trail like the old
trail. And at last it seemed as if he had driven his tent-peg in the
Long Valley for ever; for, from among the women who came, he chose one
comely and wise and kind, and fo