wreak himself, and in a half frenzy of madness he hurried towards a spot in the edge of the Slashing, towards which the cowardly thing had run when it fled from his onset.  He paused to listen upon the margin of that tangled wilderness of young trees, briers, and decaying trunks.  How solemn and quiet, wild and lonely it was, in the deep night and deeper woods!  The solemn hush fell upon the bruised spirit of the youth with the quieting touch and awe of a palpable presence, rebukingly, yet tenderly and pityingly.

Quick to compassionate others, he had ever been relentless to himself, and refused to regard himself as an object of injustice, or as needing compassion.  As he stood for a moment confronting himself, scorned, despised and humiliated, he felt for himself the measureless contempt to which he seemed to have fallen; yet, under it all, and against it all, he arose.  “Oh, Bart!  Bart! what a poor, abject, grovelling thing you really are,” he said bitterly, “when the word of a girl so overcomes you! when the slap of her little hand so benumbs and paralyzes you!  If you can’t put her haunting face from you now, God can hardly help you.  How grand she was, in her rage and scorn!  Let me always see her thus!” and he turned back into the old road.  Along this he sauntered until his eye met the dull gleam of his rifle-barrel against the old stump where he left it.  With a great start, he exclaimed, “Oh, if I could only go back to the moment when I stood here with power to choose, and dream!” It was a momentary weakness, a mere recoil from the wound still so fresh and ragged.

It was still in early evening, with time and life heavy on his hands, when he remembered that the Doctor had sent him word to come to the pond that night.  Taking his rifle by the muzzle, and throwing it across his shoulder, he plunged into the woods in a right line for the west shore of the pond, at about its midway.

Through thick woods tangled with underbrush and laced with wild vines, down steep banks, over high hills and rocky precipices, across clearings and hairy brier patches, he took his way, and found relief in the physical exertions of which he was still capable.  At last he stood on the margin of the forest and hill-embosomed waters of that lovely little lake.  It was solitary and silent, but for the weird sounds of night birds and aquatic animals that frequented its reedy margin, and a soft, silvery mist was just rising from its unruffled surface, that gathered in a translucent veil against the dark forest of the opposite shore.  Its simple, serene and quiet beauty, under the stars and rising moon, was not lost upon the poetic nature of Barton, still heaving with the recent storm.