“Something different has misled each one of us, but we have all been misled.  Why is that so?  We have greater aims than many others, but the others drove along the beaten highway right through the gates of Fortune’s house.  We stray away from the highway and into the wood.  See! am I not there myself now?  Away from the highway and into the wood, as though I were led by an inward law.  Into the wood.”  He looked round among the mountain-ashes, the birches, and other leafy trees in autumn tints.  They stood all round, dripping, as though they wept for his sorrow.  “Yes, yes; they will see me hang here, like Absalom by his long hair.”  He had not recalled this old picture a moment before he stopped, as though seized by a strong hand.

He must not fly from this, but try to fathom it.  The more he thought of it, the clearer it became:  Absalom’s history was his own.  He began with rebellion.  Naturally rebellion is the first step in a course which leads one from the highway—­leads to passion and its consequences.  That was clear enough.

Thus passion overpowered strength of purpose; thus chance circumstances sapped the foundations—­But David rebelled as well.  Why, then, was not David hung up by his hair?  It was quite as long as Absalom’s.  Yes, David was within an ace of it, right up to his old age.  But the innate strength in David was too great, his energy was always too powerful:  it conquered the powers of rebellion.  They could not drag him far away into passionate wanderings; they remained only holiday flights in his life and added poetry to it.  They did not move his strength of purpose.  Ah, ha!  It was so strong in David that he absorbed them and fed on them; and yet he was within an ace—­very often.  See!  That is what I, miserable contemptible wretch, cannot do.  So I must hang!  Very soon the man with the spear will be after me.

Rafael now set off running; probably he wished to escape the man with the spear.  He now entered the thickest part of the wood, a narrow valley between two high hills which overshadowed it.  Oh, how thirsty he was, so fearfully thirsty!  He stood still and wondered whether he could get anything to drink.  Yes, he could hear the murmur of a brook.  He ran farther down towards it.  Close by was an opening in the wood, and as he went towards the stream he was arrested by something there:  the sun had burst forth and lighted up the tree-tops, throwing deep shadows below.  Did he see anything?  Yes; it seemed to him that he saw himself, not absolutely in the opening, but to one side, in the shadow, under a tree; he hung there by his hair.  He hung there and swung, a man, but in the velvet jacket of his childhood and the tight-fitting trousers:  he swung suspended by his tangled red hair.  And farther away he distinctly saw another figure:  it was his mother, stiff and stately, who was turning round as if to the sound of music.  And, God preserve