“Damn _me_, Davy!” said he. “Hit hain’t nuvver goin’ to be said that no Joslin could do more’n a Gannt. Ye a-workin’ up here all alone!” The grizzled old man stood for a time, hands on hips, and looked about him. “What’s that blood on that rock yander?” he asked, pointing to a stain on the slabs at the corner. “I mashed my hand between a couple of rocks,” said David. He held up his hand. The edge of the palm, livid and dark blue, had been bruised off in a large half-open wound, from which the blood still oozed slowly. “It’s nothing,” said he. “I swore—before I thought. It’ll be all right.” “I haven’t any tool except this old piece of crowbar,” he went on. “Dan Bagsley, down at the shop, put a edge on this iron. I managed to quarry some rock with it on the face of the hill yonder.” “Well, I’ll be damned!” remarked Absalom quietly, and, having so expressed himself, he did not fall to work, but set off down the hill without further comment. Joslin sat down to rest on the corner stone, which, with his own hands, he had laid. The blood oozing from his hand still further stained the rock, the color spreading slowly as he sat. Under the corner stone lay something else of the life of David Joslin. He had buried here the old book of John Calvin, outlived of late, since he had found that religion and democracy, and, indeed, hope itself, are naught but human sympathy and human understanding. Between the leaves of the fierce old pragmatist’s volume there lay the photograph of a woman—a little picture Joslin himself had bought one day in a shop; the picture of a woman with large eyes, dark, curling hair, a smile upon her lips, as she leaned her face upon her folded hands. Joslin was putting away the past, not regretfully, not longingly, but reverently. The cornerstone was a milestone for him—one of the greatest of his life. After a time men came, old Absalom Gannt at their head. They spoke little, nor expressed any surprise; nor did Joslin’s mountain reticence much relax at first He only said, quietly, that now he had come home to build his school. There were teams—two mule teams, a wagon, a plough. Some bore hammers, others spades or axes. More than a dozen strong they were, and as he looked at them Joslin saw among them men of his own kin, and men who but now had been his enemies. Some now extended the excavation along the line where Joslin already had pegged out the course of his foundation. Others opened more fully the vein of sandstone at the other side of the hill. The wagons carried loads of rock now around the crest. This rock they laid with no great skill, but steadily and soundly, into the rude continuance of the foundation, which presently began to outline itself definitely and surely.