II

THE CEDARS OF LEBANON


Thomas Jefferson's twelfth summer fell in the year 1886; a year
memorable in the annals of the Lebanon iron and coal region as the first
of an epoch, and as the year of the great flood. But the herald of
change had not yet blown his trumpet in Paradise Valley; and the world
of russet and green and limestone white, spreading itself before the
eyes of the boy sitting with his hands locked over his knees on the top
step of the porch fronting the Gordon homestead, was the same world
which, with due seasonal variations, had been his world from the
beginning.

Centering in the broad, low, split-shingled house at his back, it
widened in front to the old-fashioned flower garden, to the dooryard
with its thick turf of uncut Bermuda grass, to the white pike splotched
by the shadows of the two great poplars standing like sentinels on
either side of the gate, to the wooded hills across the creek.

It was a hot July afternoon, a full month after the revival, and Thomas
Jefferson was at that perilous pass where Satan is said to lurk for the
purpose of providing employment for the idle. He was wondering if the
shade of the hill oaks would be worth the trouble it would take to
reach it, when his mother came to the open window of the living-room: a