said Abe.

It was a cool evening with a promise of frost in the air. Jack Kelso's
cabin, one of two which stood close together at the western end of the
village, was lighted by the cheery blaze of dry logs in its fireplace.
There were guns on a rack over the fireplace under a buck's head; a
powder horn hanging near them on its string looped over a nail. There
were wolf and deer and bear pelts on the floor. The skins of foxes,
raccoons and wildcats adorned the log walls. Jack Kelso was a blond,
smooth faced, good-looking, merry-hearted Scot, about forty years old,
of a rather slight build, some five feet, eight inches tall. That is all
that any one knew of him save that he spent most of his time hunting and
fishing and seemed to have all the best things, which great men had said
or written, on the tip of his tongue. He was neatly dressed in a blue
flannel coat and shirt, top boots and riding breeches.

"Welcome! and here's the best seat at the fireside," he said to Samson.

Then, as he filled his pipe, he quoted the lines from Cymbeline:

"'Think us no churls nor measure our good minds
By this rude place we live in.'

"My wife and daughter are away for a visit and for two days I've had the
cabin to myself. Look, ye worshipers of fire, and see how fine it is now!
The homely cabin is a place of beauty. Everything has the color of the
rose, coming and going in the flickering shadows. What a heaven it is
when the flames are leaping! Here is Hogarth's line of beauty; nothing
perpendicular or horizontal."