and it nettled him curiously.  All hymns were beginning to have that effect, and this one in particular always renewed the conflict between the yearning for sanctity and a desire to do something desperately wicked; the only middle course lay in flight.  Hence, the battle being fairly on, he stole another glance at the window, sprang afoot, and ran silently around the house and through the peach orchard to clamber over the low stone wall which was the only barrier on that side between the wilderness and the sown.

Once under the trees on the mountain side, the pious prompting knocked less clamorously at the door of his heart; and with its abatement the temptation to say or do the desperate thing became less insistent, also.  It was always that way.  When he was by himself in the forest, with no particularly gnawing hunger for righteousness, the devil let him alone.  The thick wood was the true whisk to brush away all the naggings and perplexities that swarmed, like house-flies in the cleared lands.  Nance Jane, the cow that did not know enough to come home at milking-time, knew that.  In the hot weather, when the blood-sucking horse-flies and sweat-bees were worst, she would crash through the thickest underbrush and so be swept clean of her tormentors.

Emulating Nance Jane, Thomas Jefferson stormed through the nearest sassafras thicket and emerged regenerate.  What next?  High up on the mountain side, lifted far above Sunday lessons and soul conflicts and perplexing questions that hung answerless in a person’s mind, was a place where the cedars smelled sweet and the west wind from the “other mountain” plashed cool in your face what time a sun-smitten Paradise Valley was like an oven.  It would be three good hours before he would have to go after Nance Jane; and the Sunday lesson—­but he had already forgotten about the Sunday lesson.

Three-quarters of the first hour were gone, and he was warm and thirsty when he topped the last of the densely-wooded lower slopes and came out on a high, rock-strewn terrace thinly set with mountain cedars.  Here his feet were on familiar ground, and a little farther on, poised on the very edge of the terrace and overtopping the tallest trees of the lower slopes, was the great, square sandstone boulder which was his present Mecca.

On its outward face the big rock, gray, lichened and weather-worn, was a miniature cliff as high as the second story of a house; and at this cliff’s foot was a dripping spring with a deep, crystalline pool for its basin.  There was a time when Thomas Jefferson used to lie flat on his stomach and quench his thirst with his face thrust into the pool.  But that was when he had got no farther than the Book of Joshua in his daily-chapter reading of the Bible.  Now he was past Judges, so he knelt and drank from his hands, like the men of Gideon’s chosen three hundred.