The mace of the mediaeval knight is the maul of to-day.  No longer it cracks heads or helmets, but there is work for it.  And it has developed into a mighty weapon.  There are two sorts of maul in the lake country.  As the stricken eagle is poetically described as supplying the feather for the arrow by which itself was hurt to death, the trees furnish forth the thing to rend them.  Upon the side of the curly maple, aristocrat of the sugar bush, grows sometimes a vast wart.  This wart has neither rhyme nor reason.  It has no grain defined.  It is twisted, convoluted, a solid, tough and heavy mass, and hard, almost, as iron.  It is sawed away from the trunk with much travail, and is seasoned well, and from it is fashioned a great head, into which is set a hickory handle, and the thing will crush a rock if need be.  This is the maul proper.

There is another maul, or mace, made from a cut of heavy iron-wood, a foot in length and half a foot in thickness, with the hickory handle set midway between iron bands, sprung on by the country blacksmith.  This is sometimes called the beetle.

The beetle is a monster hammer, the maul a monster mace.  Each serves its purpose well, but the beetle never has the swing and mighty force of the great heavy maple knot.  Grant Harlson bought a seasoned knot of an old woodman and shaped a maul.  He had learned the craft in youth.

The ash trees fell beneath the ax, the trunks were cut to rail lengths, and the oxen dragged logs through muck and mire and brush and bramble to the line of fence, and there the maul swung steadily in great strokes upon the iron and wooden wedges, the smell of timber newly split was in the air, and the heavy rails were lifted, and the fence began its growth.

And it was lonesome in the depths of the wood, for the black ash swale is not tenanted by many birds and squirrels as are the ridges, and only the striped woodpecker or a wandering jay fluttered about at times, or a coon might seek the pools for frogs.  Harlson had circumstance for thought.  Only the hard labor cleared his blood and brain, and helped him.

Could fortune come to him who had such a load upon his conscience?  Was not he a violator of all law, as he had learned it,—­law of both God and man?  Had he an excuse at all, and what was the degree of it?  He could not endure the time when it became too dark in the wood for work, and when he drove the jaded oxen out into the field and to the barn, and it was yet too early for seeking the hay-mow, which was of clover, and there seeking sleep.  A clover mow is a wonderful sleep-compeller.  There are the softness and fragrance, but, sometimes, even with that, he would be wakeful.  To avoid himself, the young man would, at last, go in early evening to the older farmers’ homes,—­for it was his own country and he knew them all,—­and there, with the sons and hired men, pitch quoits in the road before the house.