Once he sat down on a rock close by the road, with his head in his hands and his elbows on his knees, and sought again to adjust his course to the best interests of conscience and policy. A woman with a bag of fruit on her back passed him presently. He replied to her “howdy;” then after a time rose and trudged up and up the road. He had known repentance before, for he was plastic morally. But in his experience there had been no perplexity. It seemed to him, with the urgency of decision and the turmoil of doubt pressing upon him, that it was happier to be resolutely reckless. The harassments of uncertainty had affected his nerves, and he gave a quick start when the abrupt jangle of a bell smote the air. On the opposite side of the road, among the great craggy steeps, there was a wide, low niche in the face of the cliff, with a beetling roof and a confusion of rocks and bushes below. Sheep had climbed into it; some were standing looking down at him, now and then stirring and setting the bell to clanking fitfully; others lay motionless in the shadowy nook. He was about to go on; suddenly he turned and began to scale the huge fragments of rock to the niche in the cliff. “Ye clar out,” he said to the sheep as they scuttled away at his approach; “ye hev got the very spot I want.” They huddled together as he crept in; two or three hastily ran out upon the rocks,—only a little frightened, for they began presently to nibble the grass growing in the rifts. He lay down, pillowing his head upon his arm, and turning his eyes on the scene without. He could see far below into the depths of Hazel Valley, with hill and dale in undulatory succession. The light glanced here and there on the minute lines of a zigzag fence; on a field in which the stark and girdled trees stood in every gaunt attitude of despair; on a patch striped with green where tobacco grew in orderly ranks,—all amongst the dense forests, upon which these tiny suggestions of civilization seemed only some ephemeral incident, ineffective, capable of slightest significance. Beyond, the wooded mountains rose in the densities of unbroken primeval wilderness, with irregular summit-lines, with graduating tones from bronze-green to blue-gray, with a solemnity that even the sunshine did not abate. Still further, the Great Smoky, veiled with mist and vague with distance, stood high against the sky,—so high that but for the familiar changeless outline it must have seemed the fiction of the clouds. The sheep came back and crowded about him,—he lay so still. Once he was conscious of their motion; he intended to rouse himself in a moment and drive them off. And once afterward he was vaguely aware of the tinkle of the bell. Then he heard no more.