"Whut fur, ye fool? Ter make the line run ter suit him, ter take my house an' lot an' sech in his boundary, ter turn me out 'n house an' home ter suit his pleasure. He can't buy it, so he's a-fixin' ter take it,--take it by changing the corner fur the start o' the survey." His eyes dilated with anger, and his chin shook with the weakness of age and the vehemence of his emotion. Luther's face grew grave. "That's agin the law, ain't it?" "Ter move corner lan'marks or monimints o' boundaries air a felony, that's whut," said Cap'n Lucy, cavalierly swinging his feet in his stirrups. "Mr. Kenn'ston hed better gin keerful heed ter his steps." He grinned fiercely as he took up the reins, and, followed by the astounded, dismayed, and ruminating Luther, fared cheerfully enough down the mountain. VI. The roof beneath which Jack Espey had found shelter was the readiest expression of hospitality. Its several expansions beyond its builder's original gambrel design were betokened by the incongruity of the additions, and the varying tints and fashion of the warped and worn old clapboards. Two shed-rooms were obviously of a later date than the dank and mossy covering of the main building; a queer projection above a modern porch exhibited an aboriginal inspiration correlated to a dormer window, albeit lacking the aperture; a section of the limited porch itself was boarded up to serve further as house-room; and a valiant disregard of the possibility of leakage characterized the intrepid domestic architect. It further differed from the conventional roofs of the district in its surroundings. In lieu of the bare dooryard and the neighboring fields, or the low tangle of peach and apple orchards, great forest trees loomed above it, the gigantic poplar and white oak of the region; for the space about it was rugged with the outcropping rock that sheered off further down into the great precipice on the mountain slope, precluding the possibility of cultivation. An exhaustless freestone spring burst out from the rocks close at hand, the reason of the selection of its vicinity as a building-site, and the "gyardin spot" and the cornfields were lower down the slope at the side, out of view amidst the clustering foliage. So little industrial were the suggestions that hung about this roof, so allied was it in its rough, gray, mossy aspect to the rugged bark and gnarled boles of the great trees, that it too might have seemed some spontaneous production of the soil, as it rose from the ledges of the rock, mossy and gray and rugged, too, like the rest. It had an intimation, also, of an aspiration toward higher things, as it, like the trees, gazed out upon the environing lofty seclusion of the mountains, the very inner sanctuary of nature; for, save the mystic mist, or the sun and the pursuing shadow, or the vagrant wind, naught ventured into that vast semicircle of mountains and intermediate valleys that lay before it,