offish tribute to that beauty by going a little out of their way to some "look-out" evidently, from their talk, familiar to them since boyhood. This was generally the top of a cliff or rocky slide, where there were no trees to obscure the view. Arrived there, they never did anything but sit and swing their feet over emptiness, pitch stones into the void below them, and quarrel with each other about the identification of different peaks and hollows in the vast wooded expanse of mountains before them. But they were always more than usually silent after such a glimpse of the spaciousness of the world and, for one, Neale found a greatness in his heart to match the greatness which had filled his eyes.
Once as they sat thus on a crag, throwing stones and smoking, the head timber-cruiser, old Martin Hoardman, remarked to Neale, of whom they usually took little notice, "See that high range … and then that other beyond it, the one with the three-peaked mountain in the middle?"
Neale nodded.
"Wa'l, you'd never guess it, but there's a valley down in between them two, with a sight of folks in it, and farms and everything."
Another man said, "Why, old man Crittenden's got a brother lives there. Ain't that the Ashley valley? He runs an old-fashioned water-power mill there."
Martin observed, "Yep, I've drawed many a load of logs to the old man's mill."
Neale remembered the sharp-spoken old man who had visited Grandfather's mill one day when he was a little boy. He had said then, he would go up to Ashley some day and make Uncle Burton a visit. Well, if he were a crow or a hawk, he could do it now, in about half an hour. He sat dreaming, his eyes fixed on the two hazy blue lines of mountains which stood up so high and so close to each other that they entirely hid the valley between. It must be a quiet, sheltered spot, that valley.
"Time to be movin' on," said old Martin, getting to his feet, and striding off into the woods, with his strong, unelastic, never-tiring gait.
