Quoits is still a game of farmers’ sons, and the horseshoe is superior to the quoit of commerce and the town.  The open side affords facility for aggressive feats of cleverness in displacing an opponent’s cast, and the corks upon the shoes reduce some sliding chances, and the game has quality.  And Harlson found rather a distraction in the contests.  He found, maybe, distraction, too, in chatting with slim Jenny Bierce, who was a very little girl when he was in the country school, but who had grown into almost a woman, and who was a trifle more refined, perhaps, than most of her associates.  She had a sweetheart, a stalwart young farmer named Harrison Woodell, one of the schoolmates of Harlson’s early youth, but she liked to talk with Harlson.  He was different from her own lover; no better, of course, but he had lived another life, and could tell her many things.

And Woodell, who expected to marry her, glowered a little.  She did not care for that.  Grant Harlson had not noticed it.

But neither quoits nor Jenny Bierce sufficed at all times for forgetfulness.  Harlson was in the grasp of that enemy—­or friend—­who gives vast problems, and with them no solution.  He could not rest.  He read his Bible, but that only puzzled him the more, because there seemed to him, of necessity, degrees of wrong, and he could not find a commandment which was flexible.  He chafed because there was no measure for his sentence.

A pebble at the rivulet’s head will turn the tiny current either way, and so change the course of eventual creek and river.  The pebble fell near the source in Grant Harlson’s case, for never before in his life had he studied much the moral problem.  His had been the conventional training, which is to-day the training which asks one to accept, unreasoning, the belief of yielding predecessors, and, until he felt the prick of conscience, he had never cared to question the inheritance.  Now he wanted proof.  If he could not plead not guilty, might he not, at least, find weakness in the law?  Then fell the pebble.

It was only a country newspaper, and it was only the chance verses clipped from some unknown source which turned the tide that might have grown yet have run forever between narrow banks.

For the verses—­who wrote them?—­were those of that brief poem which has made more doubters than any single revelation of the hollow-heartedness of some famed godly one; than any effort of oratory of some great agnostic; than any chapter of any book that was ever written: 

  I think till I’m weary of thinking,
    Said the sad-eyed Hindoo king,
  And I see but shadows around me,
    Illusion in every thing.

  How knowest thou aught of God,
    Of His favor or His wrath? 
  Can the little fish tell what the lion thinks,
    Or map out the eagle’s path!

  Can the Finite the Infinite search! 
    Did the blind discover the stars? 
  Is the thought that I think a thought,
    Or a throb of a brain in its bars?