This thrust was neither parried nor returned. Joel Ruggles, discreetly silent, gazed with a preoccupied air at the swift stream flowing far below, beginning to darken with the overhanging shadows of the western crags. And Mark still leaned his chin meditatively on his hands, and his hands on the muzzle of his rifle, in an attitude so careless that an unaccustomed observer might have been afraid of seeing the piece discharged and the picturesque head blown to atoms. Through the futility of much remonstrance his mother had lost her patience--no great loss, it might seem, for in her mildest days she had never been meek. Poverty and age, and in addition her anxiety concerning a son now grown to manhood, good and kind in disposition, but whose very amiability rendered him so lax in his judgment of the faults of others as to slacken the tension of his judgment of his own faults, and whose stancher characteristics were manifested only in an adamantine obstinacy to her persuasion--all were ill-calculated to improve her temper and render her optimistic, and she had had no training in the wider ways of life to cultivate tact and knowledge of character and methods of influencing it. Doubtless the “skimpy saint” in the enlightenment of his vocation would have approached the subject of these remonstrances in a far different spirit, for Mark was plastic to good suggestions, easily swayed, and had no real harm in him. He understood, too, the merit and grace of consistency, of being all of a piece with his true identity, with his real character, with the sterling values he most appreciated. But the quality that rendered him so susceptible to good influences--his adaptability--exposed him equally to adverse temptation. He had spoken truly when he had said that it was only the interest of the talk of the moonshiners and their friends--stories of hunting fierce animals in the mountain fastnesses, details of bloody feuds between neighboring families fought out through many years with varying vicissitudes, and old-time traditions of the vanished Indian, once the master of all the forests and rocks and rivers of these ancient wilds--and not the drinking of whisky, that allured him; far less the painful and often disgusting exhibitions of drunkenness he occasionally witnessed at the still, in which those sufficiently sober found a source of stupid mirth. Afterward it seemed to him strange to reflect on his course. True he had had but a scanty experience of life and the world, and the parson’s reading from the Holy Scriptures was his only acquaintance with what might be termed literature or learning in any form. But arguing merely from what he knew he risked much. From the pages of the Bible he had learned what the leprosy was, and what, he asked himself in later years, would he have thought of the mental balance of a man who frequented the society of a leper for the sake of transitory entertainment or mirth to be