IN WHICH DAVID THRYNG MAKES A DISCOVERY

Standing on the great hanging rock before his cabin, Thryng imagined himself absolutely solitary in the centre of a wide wilderness. Even the Fall Place, where lived the Widow Farwell, although so near, was not visible from this point; but when he began exploring the region about him, now on foot and now on horseback, he discovered it to be really a country of homes.

Every mule path branching off into what seemed an inaccessible wild led to some cabin, often set in a hollow on a few acres of rich soil, watered by a never failing spring, where the forest growth had been cut away to make cultivation possible. Sometimes the little log house would be perched like a lonely eagle’s nest on a mere shelflike ledge jutting out from the mountain wall,