Gordon Keith was in a particularly gloomy frame of mind on this day.  He had been trying to inspire in his pupils some conception of the poetry contained in history.  He told them the story of Hannibal—­his aim, his struggles, his conquest.  As he told it the written record took life, and he marched and fought and lived with the great Carthaginian captain—­lived for conquest.

“Beyond the Alps lies Italy.”  He had read the tale with lips that quivered with feeling, but as he looked up at his little audience, he met only listless eyes and dull faces.  A big boy was preparing a pin to evoke from a smaller neighbor the attention he himself was withholding.  The neighbor was Dave Dennison.  Dave was of late actually trying to learn something.  Dave was the only boy who was listening.  A little girl with a lisp was trying in vain to divide her attention between the story and an imprisoned fly the boy next her was torturing, whilst Phrony was reading a novel on the sly.  The others were all engaged in any other occupation than thinking of Hannibal or listening to the reader.

Gordon had shut the book in a fit of disappointment and disgust and dismissed the school, and now he was trying with very poor success to justify himself for his outbreak of impatience.  His failure spoiled the pleasure he had anticipated in going to the Springs to find out who the Madonna of the Dust was.

At a spot high up on the rocky backbone, one could see for a long way between the great brownish-gray trunks, and Gordon turned out of the dim path to walk on the thick brown carpet of pine-needles.  It was a favorite spot with Gordon, and here he read Keats and Poe and other poets of melancholy, so dear to a young man’s heart.

Beyond the pines at their eastern edge, a great crag jutted forth in a sort of shoulder, a vast flying-buttress that supported the pine-clad Ridge above—­a mighty stone Atlas carrying the hills on its shoulder.  From this rock one looked out eastward over the rolling country below to where, far beyond sloping hills covered with forest, it merged into a soft blue that faded away into the sky itself.  In that misty space lay everything that Gordon Keith had known and loved in the past.  Off there to the eastward was his old home, with its wide fields, its deep memories.  There his forefathers had lived for generations and had been the leaders, making their name always the same with that of gentleman.

Farther away, beyond that dim line lay the great world, the world of which he had had as a boy a single glimpse and which he would yet conquer.