Granpap halted. “I ain’t got time to waste corkusin’ around like this. I’ll go to the new ground and do some grubbin’. Then to-morr’ I’ll git up early and find a tree.” I was dismissed, conscience-free. Two warm days followed. On the second, I left my desk, feeling sure that I could find a sourwood in leaf on the south side of High Point. My path lay through the glen. Nearing it, I heard alarming sounds of activity, and running past the last obscuring half-acre of rhododendrons, I looked ahead. The pride of my woods measured his long trunk on the ground, half of his broken arms digging helplessly into the earth, the other half appealing to the winds, birds, and skies, that had loved him, for some mitigation of his doom. Granpap’s beaming face shone above the bleeding stump. “You oughter seen him fall! Just et up those little chestnuts and poplars as he went down.” And I had thought I heard thunder. Had even speculated on the peculiar crackling quality of the vibrations. “I don’t know how I happened to miss it when we were lookin’ around. Now we’ll get some _boards_.” A tightness of the throat kept me silent. Moreover, I could not rebuke him. He was too happy. Here was material worthy of his skill. “Sam is going to help me saw the cuts and make the bolts,” he said. “Here he comes now.” I turned away. I was the primary cause of the murder, but I could not stay to see the victim drawn and quartered. A day or two later I had to carry a message to the board-maker. I found him a little sad. “I’m gittin’ old,” he said. “These here boards are the sorriest I ever made.” “But you’ve got a good pile of them, granpap.” “Them’s my splinters,” he said, with high contempt, both for me and the boards. “That was the desaptivest tree I ever cut. I bumbed on it as fur as I could reach and it was plumb sound. But in choosin’ a board-tree you’ve got to ’low so much for what you don’t see.” He sat down. Speech was coming on the tide of injury. “A shore desaptive tree. Look at them cuts me and Sam made. Half a day’s work wasted in ’em.” I looked at the great blocks and wondered how they had cunningly escaped further mutilation. And though I saw myself roofless for the next winter, I could not repress an inward bubble over the tree’s revenge. “It had lost so many limbs when it was young and pushin’ up, that it was jest the snirliest tree I ever saw.” “Snirly, granpap?” “Ay, it must ’a’ been an awful thrifty tree. Every time a limb broke off it plumb healed up, an’ thar’s eight and ten rings over some of the scars. Here I’ve cut it down an’ split into it jest to find a lot of knot-holes spilin’ my best boards. And it looked so purty and straight.”