“You see pa had been settin’ on the anxious bench for forty years,” explained young Adam, “an’ when Mr. Mullen came, he took it away from under him, so to speak, while he was still settin’ on it.”

“’Twas my proper place,” said old Adam resentfully, “when it comes to crops or the weather I am firm fixed enough in my belief, but in matters of religion I hold with the onsartain.”

“Only his powerful belief in the Devil an’ all his works keeps him from bein’ a heathen,” observed young Adam in awe-stricken pride.  “Even Mr. Mullen can’t move him, he’s so terrible set.”

“Well, he ain’t my Redeemer, though doubtless he’d be cast down if he was to hear as I’d said so,” chuckled the elder.  “The over earnest, like the women folk, are better not handled at all or handled techily.  I’m near blind as it is, but ain’t that the man yonder leadin’ his horse out of the Applegate road?”

“‘Taint the rector, but the miller,” responded his son.  “He’s bringin’ over Mrs. Bottom’s sack of meal on the back of his grey mare.”

“Ah, he’s one of the folks that’s gone over neck an’ crop to the Episcopals,” said Solomon Hatch.  “His folks have been Presbyterians over at Piping Tree sence the time of Noah, but he recites the Creed now as loud as he used to sing the doxology.  I declar his voice boomed out so in my ears last Sunday that I was obleeged to put up my hands to keep ‘em from splittin’.  Have you ever marked, Mr. Doolittle, havin’ had the experience of ninety years, that when a man once takes up with a heresy, he shouts a heap louder than them that was born an’ baptised in it?  It seems as if they can’t desert the ancient ways without defying ’em as well.”

“’Tis so, ’tis so,” admitted old Adam, wagging his head, “but Abel Revercomb was al’ays the sort that could measure nothin’ less than a bushel.  The pity with big-natured folk is that they plough up a mountain and trip at last over a pea-vine!”

From the gloom and brightness of the Applegate road there emerged the large figure of a young man, who led a handsome grey mare by the halter.  As he moved against the coloured screen of the leaves something of the beauty of the desolate landscape showed in his face—­the look of almost autumnal sadness that one finds, occasionally, in the eyes of the imaginative rustic.  He wore a pair of sheepskin leggins into which the ends of his corduroy trousers were stuffed slightly below the knees.  His head was bare, and from the open neck of his blue flannel shirt, faded from many washings, the muscles in his throat stood out like cords in the red-brown flesh.  From his uncovered dark hair to his heavy boots, he was powdered with the white dust of his mill, the smell of which floated to the group under the mulberry tree as he passed up the walk to the tavern.

“I lay he seed Molly Merryweather comin’ up from the low grounds,” remarked Solomon, when the young man had moved out of earshot.