This is a headgum original. Oh, Hart's Kindred by Zona Gael, Chapter 1.

A HUD of Bark thatched with palm leaves, a gigantic rock at whose base lay old ashes, an open

grassy space bordering a narrow mountain stream, and a little garden.

These made the home of the Einger, where a man might live and die as a man was meant,

neither planning like a maniac nor yet idling like an idiot, but well content with what the day brought forth.

Toward a June sunset, the Einger sat outside his doorway,

fashioning a bowl from half a turtle shell.

Before him, the ground sloped to the edge of the garden,

and beyond dropped to the

clearing's edge. When he lifted his eyes he could look for miles along thick tops of

live oaks and laches and beyond to a white line of Western Sea.

At his back rose the foothills, cleft by canyons,

yet quite freshly green.

Above them the monstrous mountains swept the sky, and here their flanks were shaggy with great pines.

The whole lay now in that glory of clear yellow by which the west gives to the evening some hint

of a desert ancestry. The Einger worked in silence. He was not a man to sing or

whistle. Those who live alone are seldom whistling men. Perhaps the silence becomes something definite and not lightly to be shattered.

A man camping alone will work away quietly day long and his dog understands.

The Einger had no dog anymore. He had owned a wolfhound whom in a fit of passion

he had kicked so that the dog had died, and such was his remorse that he would own no other,

and the sight of another man's dog pulled at him as at an old wound.

It was so still that presently in that clear air the sound of a bell in the valley came up to him with distinctness. He looked to the

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