There is nothing that irritates a Kelt so much as the least consideration for any animal, and there was not a man in the whole of the Rhos peninsula who did not sympathize with the corpse of William Day. In the end the dispute was settled by a neighbouring parson's coming over and reading the burial service over the blacksmith's grave. Mark apprehended that his grandfather resented bitterly the compromise as his fellow parson called it, the surrender as he himself called it. This was the second time that Mark had witnessed the defeat of a superior being whom he had been taught to regard as invincible, and it slightly clouded that perfect serenity of being grown up to which, like most children, he looked forward as the end of life's difficulties. He argued the justification of his grandfather's action with Cass Dale, and he found himself confronted by the workings of a mind naturally nonconformist with its rebellion against authority, its contempt of tradition, its blend of self-respect and self-importance. When Mark found himself in danger of being beaten in argument, he took to his fists, at which method of settling a dispute Cass Dale proved equally his match; and the end of it was that Mark found himself upside down in a furze bush with nothing to console him but an unalterable conviction that he was right and, although tears of pain and mortification were streaming down his cheeks, a fixed resolve to renew the argument as soon as he was the right way up again, and if necessary the struggle as well.