Shortly, a candle flickered inside, before a small hand mirror. Scissors and safety razor were for a while busy. The man who entered in impeccable clothes emerged fifteen minutes later--transformed. There appeared under the rising June crescent, a smooth-faced native, clad in stained store-clothes, with rough woolen socks showing at his brogan tops, and a battered felt hat drawn over his face. No one who had known the Samson South of four years ago would fail to recognize him now. And the strangest part, he told himself, was that he felt the old Samson. He no longer doubted his courage. He had come home, and his conscience was once more clear. The mountain roads and the mountain sides themselves were sweetly silent. Moon mist engulfed the flats in a lake of dreams, and, as the livery-stable horse halted to pant at the top of the final ridge, he could see below him his destination. The smaller knobs rose like little islands out of the vapor, and yonder, catching the moonlight like scraps of gray paper, were two roofs: that of his uncle's house--and that of the Widow Miller. At a point where a hand-bridge crossed the skirting creek, the boy dismounted. Ahead of him lay the stile where he had said good-by to Sally. The place was dark, and the chimney smokeless, but, as he came nearer, holding the shadows of the trees, he saw one sliver of light at the bottom of a solid shutter; the shutter of Sally's room. Yet, for a while, Samson stopped there, looking and making no sound. He stood at his Rubicon--and behind him lay all the glitter and culture of that other world, a world that had been good to him. That was to Samson South one of those pregnant and portentous moments with which life sometimes punctuates its turning points. At such times, all the set and solidified strata that go into the building of a man's nature may be uptossed and rearranged. So, the layers of a mountain chain and a continent that have for centuries remained steadfast may break and alter under the stirring of earthquake or volcano, dropping heights under water and throwing new ranges above the sea. There was passing before his eyes as he stood there, pausing, a panorama much vaster than any he had been able to conceive when last he stood there. He was seeing in review the old life and the new, lurid with contrasts, and, as the pictures of things thousands of miles away rose before his eyes as clearly as the serried backbone of the ridges, he was comparing and settling for all time the actual values and proportions of the things in his life.