All might have been so different.  What a fearful thing would it have been for me to have found my mind so full of my own cares, that I was unable to do God’s work and bear my neighbour’s burden!  But even then I would have cried to Him, and said, “I know Thee that Thou art not a hard master.”

Now, however, that I have quite accounted, as I believe, by the peculiarity both of my disposition and circumstances, for unusual wanderings under conditions when most people consider themselves fortunate within doors, I must return to Catherine Weir, the eccentricity of whose late behaviour, being in the particulars discussed identical with that of mine, led to the necessity for the explanation of my habits given above.

One January afternoon, just as twilight was folding her gray cloak about her, and vanishing in the night, the wind blowing hard from the south-west, melting the snow under foot, and sorely disturbing the dignity of the one grand old cedar which stood before my study window, and now filled my room with the great sweeps of its moaning, I felt as if the elements were calling me, and rose to obey the summons.  My sister was, by this time, so accustomed to my going out in all weathers, that she troubled me with no expostulation.  My spirits began to rise the moment I was in the wind.  Keen, and cold, and unsparing, it swept through the leafless branches around me, with a different hiss for every tree that bent, and swayed, and tossed in its torrent.  I made my way to the gate and out upon the road, and then, turning to the right, away from the village, I sought a kind of common, open and treeless, the nearest approach to a moor that there was in the county, I believe, over which a wind like this would sweep unstayed by house, or shrub, or fence, the only shelter it afforded lying in the inequalities of its surface.

I had walked with my head bent low against the blast, for the better part of a mile, fighting for every step of the way, when, coming to a deep cut in the common, opening at right angles from the road, whence at some time or other a large quantity of sand had been carted, I turned into its defence to recover my breath, and listen to the noise of the wind in the fierce rush of its sea over the open channel of the common.  And I remember I was thinking with myself:  “If the air would only become faintly visible for a moment, what a sight it would be of waste grandeur with its thousands of billowing eddies, and self-involved, conflicting, and swallowing whirlpools from the sea-bottom of this common!” when, with my imagination resting on the fancied vision, I was startled by such a moan as seemed about to break into a storm of passionate cries, but was followed by the words: 

“O God!  I cannot bear it longer.  Hast thou no help for me?”

Instinctively almost I knew that Catherine Weir was beside me, though I could not see where she was.  In a moment more, however, I thought I could distinguish through the darkness—­imagination no doubt filling up the truth of its form—­a figure crouching in such an attitude of abandoned despair as recalled one of Flaxman’s outlines, the body bent forward over the drawn-up knees, and the face thus hidden even from the darkness.  I could not help saying to myself, as I took a step or two towards her, “What is thy trouble to hers!”