I rose each day with the morning sun, and left my desolate inn.  As my feet strayed through the unpeopled country, my thoughts rambled through the universe, and I was least miserable when I could, absorbed in reverie, forget the passage of the hours.  Each evening, in spite of weariness, I detested to enter any dwelling, there to take up my nightly abode—­I have sat, hour after hour, at the door of the cottage I had selected, unable to lift the latch, and meet face to face blank desertion within.  Many nights, though autumnal mists were spread around, I passed under an ilex—­many times I have supped on arbutus berries and chestnuts, making a fire, gypsy-like, on the ground—­because wild natural scenery reminded me less acutely of my hopeless state of loneliness.  I counted the days, and bore with me a peeled willow-wand, on which, as well as I could remember, I had notched the days that had elapsed since my wreck, and each night I added another unit to the melancholy sum.

I had toiled up a hill which led to Spoleto.  Around was spread a plain, encircled by the chestnut-covered Appennines.  A dark ravine was on one side, spanned by an aqueduct, whose tall arches were rooted in the dell below, and attested that man had once deigned to bestow labour and thought here, to adorn and civilize nature.  Savage, ungrateful nature, which in wild sport defaced his remains, protruding her easily renewed, and fragile growth of wild flowers and parasite plants around his eternal edifices.  I sat on a fragment of rock, and looked round.  The sun had bathed in gold the western atmosphere, and in the east the clouds caught the radiance, and budded into transient loveliness.  It set on a world that contained me alone for its inhabitant.  I took out my wand—­I counted the marks.  Twenty-five were already traced—­twenty-five days had already elapsed, since human voice had gladdened my ears, or human countenance met my gaze.  Twenty-five long, weary days, succeeded by dark and lonesome nights, had mingled with foregone years, and had become a part of the past—­the never to be recalled—­a real, undeniable portion of my life—­twenty-five long, long days.

Why this was not a month!—­Why talk of days—­or weeks—­or months—­I must grasp years in my imagination, if I would truly picture the future to myself—­three, five, ten, twenty, fifty anniversaries of that fatal epoch might elapse—­every year containing twelve months, each of more numerous calculation in a diary, than the twenty-five days gone by—­Can it be?  Will it be?—­We had been used to look forward to death tremulously—­ wherefore, but because its place was obscure?  But more terrible, and far more obscure, was the unveiled course of my lone futurity.  I broke my wand; I threw it from me.  I needed no recorder of the inch and barley-corn growth of my life, while my unquiet thoughts created other divisions, than those ruled over by the planets—­and, in looking back on the age that had elapsed since I had been alone, I disdained to give the name of days and hours to the throes of agony which had in truth portioned it out.