"O for a heart to praise my God!"

and it nettled him curiously. All hymns were beginning to have that
effect, and this one in particular always renewed the conflict between
the yearning for sanctity and a desire to do something desperately
wicked; the only middle course lay in flight. Hence, the battle being
fairly on, he stole another glance at the window, sprang afoot, and ran
silently around the house and through the peach orchard to clamber over
the low stone wall which was the only barrier on that side between the
wilderness and the sown.

Once under the trees on the mountain side, the pious prompting knocked
less clamorously at the door of his heart; and with its abatement the
temptation to say or do the desperate thing became less insistent, also.
It was always that way. When he was by himself in the forest, with no
particularly gnawing hunger for righteousness, the devil let him alone.
The thick wood was the true whisk to brush away all the naggings and
perplexities that swarmed, like house-flies in the cleared lands. Nance
Jane, the cow that did not know enough to come home at milking-time,
knew that. In the hot weather, when the blood-sucking horse-flies and
sweat-bees were worst, she would crash through the thickest underbrush
and so be swept clean of her tormentors.

Emulating Nance Jane, Thomas Jefferson stormed through the nearest
sassafras thicket and emerged regenerate. What next? High up on the
mountain side, lifted far above Sunday lessons and soul conflicts and
perplexing questions that hung answerless in a person's mind, was a
place where the cedars smelled sweet and the west wind from the "other
mountain" plashed cool in your face what time a sun-smitten Paradise
Valley was like an oven. It would be three good hours before he would