Lonelier than I had yet been since that day, three months gone, when I
had set out from our plantation on the shallow Halifax, which the
hammock scarcely separates from the ocean, I gathered bridle with
listless fingers and spoke to my mare. "Isene, we must be moving
eastward--always moving, sweetheart. Come, lass, there's grain somewhere
in this Northern land where you have carried me." And to myself,
muttering aloud as I rode: "A fine name he has given to my cousins the
Varicks, this giant forest-runner, with his boy's face and limbs of
iron! And he was none too cordial concerning the Butlers,
either--cousins, too, but in what degree they must tell me, for I
don't know--"

The road entering the forest, I ceased my prattle by instinct, and again
for the thousandth time I sniffed at odors new to me, and scanned leafy
depths for those familiar trees which stand warden in our Southern
forests. There were pines, but they were not our pines, these feathery,
dark-stemmed trees; there were oaks, but neither our golden water oaks
nor our great, green-and-silver live-oaks. Little, pale flowers bloomed
everywhere, shadows only of our bright blossoms of the South; and the
rare birds I saw were gray and small, and chary of song, as though the
stillness that slept in this Northern forest was a danger not to be
awakened. Loneliness fell on me; my shoulders bent and my head hung
heavily. Isene, my mare, paced the soft forest-road without a sound, so
quietly that the squatting rabbit leaped from between her forelegs, and
the slim, striped, squirrel-like creatures crouched paralyzed as we
passed ere they burst into their shrill chatter of fright or anger, I
know not which.

Had I a night to spend in this wilderness I should not know where to
find a palmetto-fan for a torch, where to seek light-wood for splinter.