When my first confusion had passed away, I found that I was lying in a dense green glen at the foot of a cliff.  For some moments I could think of nothing but my extraordinary escape from destruction.  Within reach of my hand lay the creature who had carried me, huddled and motionless; and to left and to right of me, and one a little nearer the base of the cliff, five of those sorrel horses that had been chief of our pursuers.  One only of them was alive, and he, also, broken and unable to rise—­unable to do else than watch with fierce, untamed, glazing eyes (a bloody froth at his muzzle,) every movement and sign of life I made.

I myself, though bruised and bleeding, had received no serious injury.  But my Yahoo would rise no more.  His master was left alone amidst his people.  I stooped over him and bathed his brow and cheeks with the water that trickled from the cliffs close at hand.  I pushed back the thick strands of matted yellow hair from his eyes.  He made no sign.  Even while I watched him the life of the poor beast near at hand welled away:  he whinnied softly, and dropped his head upon the bracken.  I was alone in the unbroken silence.

It seemed a graceless thing to leave the carcasses of these brave creatures uncovered there.  So I stripped off branches of the trees, and gathered bundles of fern and bracken, with which to conceal awhile their bones from wolf and fowl.  And him whom I had begun to love I covered last, desiring he might but return, if only for a moment, to bid me his strange farewell.

This done, I pushed through the undergrowth from the foot of the sunny cliffs, and after wandering in the woods, came late in the afternoon, tired out, to a ruinous hut.  Here I rested, refreshing myself with the unripe berries that grew near by.

I remained quite still in this mouldering hut looking out on the glens where fell the sunlight.  Some homely bird warbled endlessly on in her retreat, lifted her small voice till every hollow resounded with her content.  Silvery butterflies wavered across the sun’s pale beams, sipped, and flew in wreaths away.  The infinite hordes of the dust raised their universal voice till, listening, it seemed to me their tiny Babel was after all my own old, far-off English, sweet of the husk.

Fate leads a man through danger to his delight.  Me she had led among woods.  Nameless though many of the cups and stars and odours of the flowers were to me, unfamiliar the little shapes that gamboled in fur and feather before my face, here dwelt, mummy of all earth’s summers, some old ghost of me, sipper of sap, coucher in moss, quieter than dust.

So sitting, so rhapsodising, I began to hear presently another sound—­the rich, juicy munch-munch of jaws, a little blunted maybe, which yet, it seemed, could never cry Enough! to these sweet, succulent grasses.  I made no sign, waited with eyes towards the sound, and pulses beating as if for a sweetheart.  And soon, placid, unsurprised, at her extreme ease, loomed into sight who but my ox-headed Rosinante in these dells, cropping her delightful way along in search of her drowned master.