hardly more than a month his past was posed before his critical
judgment. Looked at in this manner his life appeared crowded with
surprisingly meaningless gestures and words, his sheer youth an
incomprehensible revolt. A greater part of that had been lately
expressed by his mother, when he had returned to Myrtle Forge with an
arm broken by a fall in a railroad coach travelling to Philadelphia. She
had said, shaking her head with tightened lips:

"I warned you plenty against those train brigades. It isn't safe nor
sensible with a good horse service convenient. But then you have always
been a knowing, head-strong boy and man.... A black Penny."

How she would get along without that last phrase he was at a loss to
conjecture, from his first consciousness he recalled it, now a term of
reproach and now extenuation. Only a few weeks before she had repeated
it in precisely the same tone of mingled admonition and complaint that
had greeted his most boyish mishaps. He had grown so accustomed to it,
not only from Gilda Penny but from every one familiar with the Pennys
and their history, that it had become part of his automatic entity.
Jasper--a black Penny.

The course of his thoughts turned back to the earliest episodes
remembered in that connection, to a time in which the especial quality
had necessarily freest play. Now he characterized it as mere uninformed
wildness; but he still recalled the tremendous impatience with which he
had met the convenient enclosure of a practicable, organized society.
Even at Myrtle Forge, where--in contrast to dwelling in the confines of
a city--he had had a rare amount of actual freedom, a feeling of
constriction had sent him day after day into the woods, hunting or
merely idle along the upper reaches of still unsullied streams. Yet it