effect. I had grown hardened and had come to accept my fate, at first
rebelliously, then with more of Lute's peculiar kind of philosophy.
Circumstances had doomed me to be a good-for-nothing, a gentleman loafer
without the usual excuse--money--and, as it was my doom, I forced myself
to accept it, if not with pleasure, at least with resignation. And I
determined to get whatever pleasure there might be in it. So, when I saw
the majority of the human race, each with a purpose in life, struggling
to attain that purpose, I passed them by with my gun or fishing rod
on my shoulder, and a smile on my lips. If my remnant of a conscience
presumed to rise and reprove me, I stamped it down. It had no reasonable
excuse for rising; I wasn't what I was from choice.

But, somehow, on this particular morning, my unreasonable conscience was
again alive and kicking. Perhaps it was the quickening influence of the
spring which resurrected it; perhaps Luther's quotation from the remarks
of Captain Jedediah Dean had stirred it to rebellion. A man may know, in
his heart, that he is no good and still resent having others say that he
is, particularly when they say that he and Luther Rogers are birds of a
feather. I didn't care for Dean's good opinion; of course I didn't! Nor
for that of any one else in Denboro, my mother excepted. But Dean and
the rest should keep their opinions to themselves, confound them!

The path from our house--the latter every Denboro native spoke of as
the "Paine Place"--wound along the edge of the bluff for perhaps three
hundred yards, then turned sharply through the grove of scrub oaks and
pitch pines and emerged on the Shore Lane. The Shore Lane was not a
public road, in the strictest sense of the term. It was really a part of
my land and, leading, as it did, from the Lower Road to the beach, was
used as a public road merely because mother and I permitted it to be. It
had been so used, by sufferance of the former owner, for years, and when