strength of the whirl of the planet through space.  Deeper into the shadow we plunged with every echoing tread of the hoofs.  The lair of some mysterious presence was about us,—­unshaped, unrealized, as in some place of antique awe before the time of temples or of gods.  It seemed a corporal thing.  If I stretched out my hand I should touch it like the ground.  It came out from all the black rifts, it rolled from the moonlit distinct heights, it filled the chill air,—­it was an envelopment—­it would be an engulfment—­horse and man we were sinking in it.  Then it was—­most in all my days—­that I felt dense mystery overwhelming me.  “O infinite earth,” I thought, “our unknowing mother, our unknowing grave!”—­“What is it?” he said, feeling my wrist straighten where it lay on his shoulder, and the tremor and the hand seeking him.  Was it a premonition?  “Nothing,” I answered, and did not tell him; but he began to cheer me with lighter talk, and win me back to the levels of life, and under his sensitive and loving ways, the excitement of the ride died out, and an hour later, after midnight, we drove into the silent town.  We put the ponies up, praising them with hand and voice; and then he took both my hands in his and said, “The truest thing you ever said was what you wrote me, ‘We live each others’ lives.’” That was his thanks.

O brave and tender heart, now long lapped under the green fold of that far prairie in his niche of earth!  How often I see him as in our first days,—­the boy of seventeen summers, lying on his elbows over his Thackeray, reading by the pictures, and laughing to himself hour after hour; and many a prairie adventure, many happy days and fortunate moments come back, with the strength and bloom of youth, as I recall the manly figure, the sensitive and eager face, and all his resolute ways.  Who of us knows what he is to another?  He could not know how much his life entered into mine, and still enters.  But he is dead; and I have set down these weak and stammering words of the life we began together, not for the strong and sure, but for those who, though true hearts, find it hard to lay hold of truth, and doubt themselves, in the hope that some younger comrade of life, though unknown, may make them of avail and find in them the dark leading of a hand.