“There was old Joe Cumberland, at death’s door and beyond the reach of my knowledge; and he had been taken away from death by the wild man, Dan Barry.  There was the girl with the bright hair—­Kate Cumberland.  In education, nothing; in brain, nothing; in experience, nothing; and yet I was attracted.  But she was not attracted in the least until along came the wild man again, and then she fell into his arms—­actually fought for him!  Why?  I could not tell.  My name and the things I have done and even my money, meant nothing to her.  But when he came it was only a glance, a word, a smile, and she was in his arms.  I felt like Caligula.  I wished the world had only one neck, and I an axe.  But why should I have felt depressed because of failures in the eyes of these silly yokels?  Not one of them could read the simplest chemical formula!

“All very absurd, you will agree, and you may get some inkling as to my state of mind while I walked over those same dark hills.  I seemed a part of that darkness.  I looked up to the stars.  They were merely like the pages of a book.  I named them off hand, one after the other, and thought of their characteristics, their distances, their composition, and meditated on the marvels the spectrum has made known to us.  But no sooner did such a train of thoughts start in my brain, than I again recurred to the girl, Kate Cumberland, and all I was aware of was a pain at heart—­something like homesickness.  Very strange.

“She and the man are together constantly.  The other day I was in Joseph Cumberland’s room and we heard whistling outside.  The face of the old man lighted, ‘They are together again,’ he said.  ’How do you guess at that?’ I asked.  ‘By the sound of his whistling,’ he answered.  ’For he whistles as if he expected an answer—­as if he were talking with someone.’  And by the Lord, the old man was right.  It would never have occurred to me!

“Now as I started down the farther slope of a hill a whistling sound ran upon me through the wind, and looking back I saw a horseman galloping with great swiftness along the line of the crest, very plainly outlined by the sky, and by something of smoothness in the running of the horse I knew that it was Barry and his black stallion.  But the whistling—­the music!  Dear God, man, have you read of the pipes of Pan?  That night I heard them and it made a riot in my heart.

“He was gone, suddenly, and the whistling went out like a light, but something had happened inside me—­the first beginning of this process of internal change.  The ground no longer seemed so dark.  There were earth smells—­very friendly—­I heard some little creature chirruping contentedly to itself.  Something hummed—­a grasshopper, perhaps.  And then I looked up to the stars.  There was not a name I could think of—­I forgot them all, and for the first time I was contented to look at them and wonder at their beauty without an attempt at analysis or labelling.