silvered
by the moon, at a wonderful height. Vaguely, amid the half gloom, he
caught glimpses of myriads of trunks of all forms, upright, inclined,
contorted, crossed in strange postures of menace and of conflict; some
overthrown on the earth, like towers which had fallen bodily, and
covered with a dense and confused mass of vegetation, which seemed like
a furious throng, disputing the ground span by span; others collected in
great groups, vertical and serrated, like trophies of titanic lances,
whose tips touched the clouds; a superb grandeur, a prodigious disorder
of colossal forms, the most majestically terrible spectacle which
vegetable nature ever presented.

At times he was overwhelmed by a great stupor. But his mind instantly
took flight again towards his mother. He was worn out, with bleeding
feet, alone in the middle of this formidable forest, where it was only
at long intervals that he saw tiny human habitations, which at the foot
of these trees seemed like the ant-hills, or some buffalo asleep beside
the road; he was exhausted, but he was not conscious of his exhaustion;
he was alone, and he felt no fear. The grandeur of the forest rendered
his soul grand; his nearness to his mother gave him the strength and the
hardihood of a man; the memory of the ocean, of the alarms and the
sufferings which he had undergone and vanquished, of the toil which he
had endured, of the iron constancy which he had displayed, caused him to
uplift his brow. All his strong and noble Genoese blood flowed back to
his heart in an ardent tide of joy and audacity. And a new thing took
place within him; while he had, up to this time, borne in his mind an
image of his mother, dimmed and paled somewhat by the two years of
absence, at that moment the image grew clear; he again beheld her face,
perfect and distinct, as he had not beheld it for a long time; he beheld
it close to him, illuminated, speaking; he again beheld the most
fleeting motions of her eyes, and of her lips, all her attitudes, all
the shades of her thoughts; and urged on by these pursuing
recollections, he hastened his steps; and a new affection, an
unspeakable tenderness, grew in him, grew in his heart, making sweet and
quiet tears to flow down his face; and as he advanced through the gloom,
he spoke to her, he said to her the words which he would murmur in her
ear in a little while more:--

"I am here, my mother; behold me here. I will never leave you again; we
will ret