“Oh, I see,” the boy nodded slowly, but his voice was insurgent.  “I guess you think Almighty God wants the creatures He made to sit around and sing about there bein’ work to do.  I wonder you don’t feel afraid to eat buckwheat cakes that He doesn’t send down to you by an angel with His compliments.  My idea is that He wants folks to do things for themselves and not to sing about it.  As for being discontented, that’s the one thing that drives the world around.  I think God made discontent just for that.”

Aunt Hannah moistened her lips.  For decades she had been the member of a God-fearing, toiling family whose righteousness was the righteousness of stagnation.  Now she stood face to face with radical heresy.

“But,” she argued with some dumb feeling that she was defending Divinity, “the Scriptures teach contentment an’ it’s worldly to be vain.”

“Why not be worldly?” flared the boy with a new and indomitable light in his eyes.  “As for me I’m sick of this life in a place that’s dry-rotting.  What I want is the world—­the whole of it, good an’ bad.  I want what you can win out of fighting.  Mary wants to be pretty.  Why shouldn’t she?  What does any woman get out of life except what men give her—­and what man gives much to the ugly ones?”

“It ain’t what men give that’s to be counted a prize,” came the pious rejoinder.  “It’s what heaven gives.”

“Heaven gave you a dust-rag and rheumatism.  If they suit you, all well and good.  I’m going to see that the world gives Mary what she wants.  If a girl can be made pretty Mary’s going to be pretty.  It’s what a woman’s got a right to want and I’m going to get it for her.”

With a violent gesture the boy flung himself from the room and slammed the door behind him.

Because it was Saturday and there was no school that day, Ham left the house and turned into the woods.  He tramped with his brow drawn and a hundred insurgent thoughts swirling in his brain.

He passed across hills holding to their final flare of color, where leaves were drifting down from trees of yellow and crimson.  He threaded alder thickets and passed through groves of silver birches that shivered fastidiously in the breeze.  Wild apple trees raised gnarled branches under which the “punches” of hooves told of deer that had been feeding.  At last, he came to a clearing where fire had eaten its way and charred the ruins of the forest.  There a large buck lifted its antlered head among the berry bushes and stood for a moment at startled gaze.  But Ham made no movement to raise the rifle that swung at his side, and as the red-brown shape disappeared with a soft clatter, the boy did not even throw a glance after it.  He was saying to himself:  “William the Conqueror was a baker’s son; Napoleon was the friend of a washer-woman; Cecil Rhodes was a poor boy—­but they didn’t stay tied down too long.”

Now and again, a rabbit scuttled off to cover, and often with the whir of drumming wings a grouse rose noisily and lumbered away with spread tail into the painted foliage.  But all the beauty of it was a beauty of wildness and of nature’s victory over man.  For such beauty Ham felt no answer of pulse or heart.