Perhaps in human experience naught might more fitly foster this repulsion of the world than certain stages of a political canvass. Jepson stood with his hat in his hand, feeling foreign among them all, looking now down in the valley, and again up to the great heights; wondering sub-acutely if it were only yesterday that he had heard David sing to the dulcet measure of the lilting harp-strings, and watched the moody Saul listening on his couch, his dexterous hand toying with the stealthy javelin, ready to launch it at the head of the singer,—only yesterday that he had seen the high-priest’s rod blossom in the tabernacle, had heard the waters gush from the rock that Moses smote. Still the solemn clouds, as then, mysteriously communed with peak and cliff; the radiant sunshine wore a rich effulgence among the lonely and far-away ranges, blue and unreal, like some fine deceit of the senses, ineffably ethereal as they withdrew into the unseen spaces. The valley, mute and peaceful, lay far below, with here and there a harvested field—a tiny yellow square—and a flash of water; and further, a wisp of smoke that came from an invisible chimney, the only motion in the supreme tranquillity of the scene. Here, higher up, where the massive purple range yawned with the wide deep interval called Broomsedge Cove, which seemed to be in the valley as one looked at the vast steep stretches of the mountains above, and seemed on the range when one looked down at the valley below, the men wrangled loudly, the oxen lowed; there was a great clamor among the horses, and suddenly Teck Jepson heard his name called. He turned slowly, to see his mare’s hoof in the hands of the blacksmith, who from his leaning posture looked up, and nodded to him to approach. Clem Sanders, ejected from the forge by its conversion to the public uses, was devoting the day to the pursuit of art for art’s sake. He had on his leather apron, and the sleeve of his hammer-arm was well rolled back, showing its swelling cords. He carried a hammer in his hand, and was going about examining the feet of all the horses that had been ridden to the Settlement that day. He seemed by some means to recognize his own work, and he would stoop down and take the hoof up, and tell when he had made that shoe and had shod that horse, and boast to the little group of idlers how his work lasted. His face was a study when, in catching up a hoof, he would descry the work of another smith,—his alert joy to discern defects, or dismayed solicitude to perceive craft as good as his own or superior. It was a happy moment with him now when he had one of the clay-bank mare’s hoofs upon his leather apron, between his knees, as he stooped. “One more sech shoein’ ez this, Teck,” he remarked oracularly, “an’ yer mare won’t have nare frawg ter her huff.”