management of her sister's ponderosity. Thus she had saved this day,
but Everett knew that there were others to come, and in the dim
distance he discerned his Waterloo.

And as he worked carefully with his examining pick over beyond the
north pasture through the soft spring-warm afternoon, he occasionally
smiled to himself as the morning scene of worship, etched deep on his
consciousness by its strangeness to his tenets of life, rose again and
again to his mind's eye. They were a wonderful people, these Valley
folk, descendants of the Huguenots and Cavaliers who had taken the
wilderness trail across the mountains and settled here "in the hollow"
of old Harpeth's hand. They were as interesting scientifically from a
philosophical standpoint as were the geological formations which lay
beneath their blue-grass and clover fields. They built altars to what
seemed to him a primitive God, and yet their codes were in many cases
not only ethically but economically and democratically sound. The men
he had found shrewd and as a whole more interested and versed in
statescraft than would seem possible, considering their shut-in
location in regard to the places where the world wheels seem to
revolve. But were there larger wheels revolving, silently, slowly, but
just as relentlessly, out here where the heavens were stretched "_as a
curtain_," and "_as a tent to dwell in_?"

"_'The earth and the fullness thereof,'_" he mused as he raised his
eyes to the sky; "it's theirs, certainly, and they dedicate it to
their God. I wonder--" Suddenly the picture of the woman in the barn
rose to his mind, strong and gracious and wonderful, with the young
"fullness" pressing around her, teeming with--force. What force--and
what source? Suddenly he dropped his pick behind a convenient bush,
shouldered his kit of rocks and sand, climbed the fence and tramped