As for meeting George
again, I felt sure that it would be all I could do to meet his brother;
and though George was always in my thoughts, it was for you and not him
that I was now yearning. When I gave George my watch, how glad I was
that I had left my gold one at home, for that is yours, and I could not
have brought myself to give it him."
"Never mind that, my dear father," said I, "but tell me how you got down
the river, and thence home again."
"My very dear boy," he said, "I can hardly remember, and I had no energy
to make any more notes. I remember putting a scrap of paper into the box
of sovereigns, merely sending George my love along with the money; I
remember also dropping the box into a hole in a tree, which I blazed, and
towards which I drew a line of wood-ashes. I seem to see a poor unhinged
creature gazing moodily for hours into a fire which he heaps up now and
again with wood. There is not a breath of air; Nature sleeps so calmly
that she dares not even breathe for fear of waking; the very river has
hushed his flow. Without, the starlit calm of a summer's night in a
great wilderness; within, a hurricane of wild and incoherent thoughts
battling with one another in their fury to fall upon him and rend him--and
on the other side the great wall of mountain, thousands of children
praying at their mother's knee to this poor dazed thing.
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