It was now broad moonlight, and Trench, who was peculiarly susceptible to the sights and sounds of Nature, was aware of the beauty of every tremulous shadow. The chill spring air was sweet with the aromatic perfume of pines and cedars, and, as he turned the shoulder of the hill, his eye swept the new-plowed fields. He could smell the grapevines that were blooming in masses by the wayside, promising a full harvest of those great purple grapes that had given the settlement its name. Below him the river forked, and in its elbow nestled the center of the village, the church at the Cross-Roads, and the little red schoolhouse where Peter Mahan had fought Jacob Eaton and whipped him at the age of twelve, long before Caleb Trench had even heard of Eshcol. To the left was the Friends’ Meeting-House, Judge Hollis’ home, and the lane which led to Trench’s shop and office. Beyond, he discerned the little old white house where Dr. William Cheyney lived, but that was where Eshcol lapped over on to Little Paradise, for they had bridged the creek ten years before. Across the river lay the city, big and smoky and busy, its spires rising above its shining roofs. A light mist, diaphanous and shimmering, floated over the lowlands by the water, and above it the dark green of the young foliage and the lovely slope of clovered fields seemed to assume a new and beautiful significance, to suggest mysterious unfoldings, buds and blossoming time, the gathered promise of a hundred springs, that mysterious awakening of life which stirred the lonely man’s imagination with a thrill of pleasure as poignant as it was unusual. To him these lonely walks at sunrise and moonrise had been his greatest solace, and there was a companionship in the slight hushed sounds of woodland life which approached his inner consciousness more nearly than the alien existence that circumstances had forced upon him. He was a stranger in almost a strange land. He had been born and brought up in Philadelphia, and his family belonged to the Society of Friends. Personally, Caleb Trench was not orthodox, but the bias of his early training held, and the poverty that had followed his father’s business failure had tended to increase the simplicity of the boy’s narrowed life. When death had intervened and taken first his father, whom business ruin had broken, and then his mother and sister, Caleb had severed the last tie that bound him to the East and started West to make his fortune, with the boundless confidence of youth that he would succeed. The lodestar that has drawn so many on that fantastic quest had drawn him, and failing in first one venture and then another, because it is easier to buy experience than to accumulate wealth, he had come at last to the little shop at Eshcol and the study of law. Wherein lay the touchstone of his life, though he knew it not.