The worthy pastor of the little country church had given him up long ago, called him an atheist, and shook his head sorrowfully when the young man’s name was mentioned in his presence. Yet Jim Bright paid a good share of the meagre salary doled out to this same pastor, and was generally the first one to be called upon for aid when more than the usual destitution prevailed. “He is not a Christian, I am afraid,” sighed the minister, in a tone of genuine sorrow. “I wish he was, for he is good.” And so it was with the rest. They could not understand this young man’s ideas; did not, as a rule, approve of his methods; but they would all unite in admitting that both Jim Bright and his sister were good, and in this homely phrase they bestowed the greatest praise possible. They were not to blame that they could not understand him better. James and Norine Bright had lived all their lives on that little mountainside farm. They had begun life in that modest cottage, and had taken their first view of this world from its little pinched-up windows. The windows were small, and the cottage itself was small. The farm was small, Jim thought; and, in fact, the only object of any size--with the exception of the mountains in front of it--was the big red barn behind it. That was large, and it needed to be; for although the farm was small, being somewhat less than fifty acres, it had been brought, after years of care, to a very high state of production, and the big red barn, large as it was, had hardly room enough to store away the wheat, oats, corn, and other grains and grasses that were annually carted through its swinging doors. Oh, a very productive farm was the Bright farm, quite a marvel of a farm in that region of poor land; but the old men of the neighborhood would shake their heads sagely when they mentioned it. “A good bit of land, that, but not cultivated as old Pat Bright used to cultivate it.” It was he, the grandfather of these two, who had first started to hew a competence out of this land. He it was that built the little cottage and the big barn, and very little had been done, the neighbors would tell you, to improve the place since old Pat died. For the father of these two had been a gentleman, and not at all adapted to the management of a farm--a gentleman indeed, inasmuch as he had been well born--one of the old Darlings of Virginia--well reared, and so far as the requirements of this workaday world went, perfectly helpless. But still he had been a gentleman, and so there was no wonder that his family had been greatly shocked when he lost his head and his heart to pretty Nora Bright. Not much of a loss, perhaps, but a great shock to the family; for Pat Bright was undoubtedly ignorant--a “clod-hopper,” I believe they called him, in their refined, gentlemanly way--and so, of course, they could expect nothing better of his daughter than that she should try, in her ignorant way, to captivate a gentleman.