Did she think to find this thing at any
crossroads? Oh, she would see. She would see. This thing was found
rarely by the luckiest, so rarely that many an old wise man held that
there was no such treasure under the sun, and the quest of it was but a
fool's errand.

I was a mile behind the drove, and when I came up it had reached the
borders of Woodford's land. Jud had thrown down the high fence,
staked-and-ridered with long chestnut rails, and the stream of cattle
was pouring through and spreading out over the great pasture. I watched
the little groups of muleys strike out through the deep broom-sedge
hollows and the narrow bulrush marshes and the low gaps of the good
sodded hills, spying this new country, finding where the grass was
sweetest and where the water bubbled in the old poplar trough, and what
wind-sheltered cove would be warmest to a fellow's belly when he lay
sleeping in the sun.

Then we rode north through the Hills, over the Gauley where the oak
leaves carpeted the ford, and the little trout darted like a beam of
light, and the old fish-hawk sat on the hanging limb of the dead
beech-tree with his shoulders to his ears and his beak drooping, like
some worn-out voluptuary brooding on his sins.

On we went through the deep wooded lanes where the redbird stepped about
in his long crimson coat, jerring at the wren, who worked in the deep
thicket as though the Master Builder had gone away to kingdom come and
left her behind to finish the world.

We came to many a familiar landmark of my golden babyhood, the enchanted
grove on the Seely Hill where I had hunted fabled monsters and gone
whooping down among the cattle, the Greathouse meadow where Red Mike
pitched me out of the saddle when he grew tired of having his bit
jerked, and I sat up in my little petticoats and solemnly demanded that
Jourdan should cut his head off, a thing the old man promised on his
sacred honour when he could borrow the ax of the man in the moon; the
high gate-post by the cattle-scales where I perched bareheaded in a
calico dress and watched old Bedford make his last fight against human
government, Bedford, a bull of mysterious notions, that would kill you
if he found you walking in his field, and lick your stirrup if you came
riding on a horse.

It was now a country of rich meadow-land, and blue-grass hills rising to
long, flat ridges that the hickories skirted; but in that other time it
was a land of wonders, where in any summer m