Kenniston looked up, a sarcastic comment in his eyes; the mere possibility of submitting the question of the boundary of his land to the wild will of a jury of mountaineers, qualified by the surveyor, according to the law of processioning land, and met in those tangled precipitous woods to discriminate in matters mathematical and to settle questions of topographical fact, seemed to him so happy a travesty of the theory of law and justice that he could not forbear a scornful smile at his own probable plight when he should come forth from such unique adjudication of his interests. "There's no disputed '_p'int_,'" he said, laughing satirically. "It's the whole confounded line from the Big Hollow Boulder to Wild Duck Falls!" "'Cordin' ter the calls an' the compass," muttered the surveyor, fast succumbing to the unholy fascinations of a dream in which he found that in seeking to ascertain the area of a triangular body of land he achieved the petrifying result of transforming it to a square. Reason revolted; he woke with a snort, filliped off the ash from his pipe, adjusted himself anew in his chair, looked very wide awake, to be overtaken again by the same irreconcilable process and result. In the diversion of Kenniston's attention he had lost the run of his ideas; he paused, puffed his cigar into a glow, pushed his chair slightly back from the table, glanced with lowering disaffection at the slumbering surveyor, and then mechanically about him at his surroundings. The house was the roughest of shells, and hardly compact enough to withstand the floods of rain that had descended upon it to-day. In one corner the floor was still damp, the eaves outside dripped. Beyond a cot, a table, and a few chairs there was no furniture save Kenniston's valise, his gun in its case, which was never opened, and a monkey stove, an object of aversion to its æsthetic owner; for, despite its utility, its outline and atmosphere were a continual affront to him, and it suffered grossly from the comparison with the great open fires of the mountaineers' hearths, the incense of hickory and ash and pine, the flash and flame and sparkle of those humble illumined interiors.