one mammal, and perhaps not more than a dozen birds of any size.  The weather at that time was cheerless, generally with a gray film of cloud spread over the sky, and a bleak wind, often cold enough to make my bridle-hand quite numb....  At a slow pace, which would have seemed intolerable under other circumstances, I would ride about for hours together at a stretch.  On arriving at a hill, I would slowly ride to its summit, and stand there to survey the prospect.  On every side it stretched away in great undulations, wild and irregular.  How gray it all was!  Hardly less so near at hand than on the haze-wrapped horizon where the hills were dim and the outline obscured by distance.  Descending from my outlook, I would take up my aimless wanderings again, and visit other elevations to gaze on the same landscape from another point; and so on for hours.  And at noon I would dismount, and sit or lie on my folded poncho for an hour or longer.  One day in these rambles I discovered a small grove composed of twenty or thirty trees, growing at a convenient distance apart, that had evidently been resorted to by a herd of deer or other wild animals.  This grove was on a hill differing in shape from other hills in its neighborhood; and, after a time, I made a point of finding and using it as a resting-place every day at noon.  I did not ask myself why I made choice of that one spot, sometimes going out of my way to sit there, instead of sitting down under any one of the millions of trees and bushes on any other hillside.  I thought nothing about it, but acted unconsciously.  Only afterward it seemed to me that, after having rested there once, each time I wished to rest again, the wish came associated with the image of that particular clump of trees, with polished stems and clean bed of sand beneath; and in a short time I formed a habit of returning, animal like, to repose at that same spot.”

“It was, perhaps, a mistake to say that I would sit down and rest, since I was never tired; and yet, without being tired, that noon-day pause, during which I sat for an hour without moving, was strangely grateful.  All day there would be no sound, not even the rustling of a leaf.  One day, while listening to the silence, it occurred to my mind to wonder what the effect would be if I were to shout aloud.  This seemed at the time a horrible suggestion, which almost made me shudder.  But during those solitary days it was a rare thing for any thought to cross my mind.  In the state of mind I was in, thought had become impossible.  My state was one of suspense and watchfulness; yet I had no expectation of meeting an adventure, and felt as free from apprehension as I feel now while sitting in a room in London.  The state seemed familiar rather than strange, and accompanied by a strong feeling of elation; and I did not know that something had come between me and my intellect until I returned to my former self,—­to thinking, and the old insipid existence [again].”