giant mountain sheep--primaeval ancestor, perhaps, of all the flocks
on earth? Your memories must be like those of Theseus and Hercules,
full of slain monsters. Your brains must be one fossiliferous
deposit, in which gaur and sambur, hog and tiger, rhinoceros and
elephant, lie heaped together, as the old ichthyosaurs and
plesiosaurs are heaped in the lias rocks at Lyme. And therefore I
like to think of you. I try to picture your feelings to myself. I
spell over with my boy Mayne Reid's amusing books, or the 'Old Forest
Ranger,' or Williams's old 'Tiger Book,' with Howitt's plates; and
try to realize the glory of a burra Shikarree: and as I read and
imagine, feel, with Sir Hugh Evans, 'a great disposition to cry.'

For there were times, full many a year ago, when my brains were full
of bison and grizzly bear, mustang and big-horn, Blackfoot and
Pawnee, and hopes of wild adventure in the Far West, which I shall
never see; for ere I was three-and-twenty, I discovered, plainly
enough, that my lot was to stay at home and earn my bread in a very
quiet way; that England was to be henceforth my prison or my palace,
as I should choose to make it: and I have made it, by Heaven's help,
the latter.

I will confess to you, though, that in those first heats of youth,
this little England--or rather, this little patch of moor in which I
have struck roots as firm as the wild fir-trees do--looked at moments
rather like a prison than a palace; that my foolish young heart would
sigh, 'Oh! that I had wings'--not as a dove, to fly home to its nest
and croodle there--but as an eagle, to swoop away over land and sea,
in a rampant and self-glorifying fashion, on which I now look back as
altogether unwholesome and undesirable. But the thirst for adventure
and excitement was strong in me, as perhaps it ought to be in all at