ttle might follow them, would be another--and a very different one.

He soon caught sight of his horse which had strayed a mile lower down the
river-bed, and in spite of his hobbles had crossed one ugly stream that
my father dared not ford on foot. Tired though he was, he went after
him, bridle in hand, and when the friendly creature saw him, it recrossed
the stream, and came to him of its own accord--either tired of his own
company, or tempted by some bread my father held out towards him. My
father took off the hobbles, and rode him bare-backed to the camping
ground, where he rewarded him with more bread and biscuit, and then
hobbled him again for the night.

"It was here," he said to me on one of the first days after his return,
"that I first knew myself to be a broken man. As for meeting George
again, I felt sure that it would be all I could do to meet his brother;
and though George was always in my thoughts, it was for you and not him
that I was now yearning. When I gave George my watch, how glad I was
that I had left my gold one at home, for that is yours, and I could not
have brought myself to give it him."

"Never mind that, my dear father," said I, "but tell me how you got down
the river, and thence home again."

"My very dear boy," he said, "I can hardly remember, and I had no energy
to make any more notes. I remember putting a scrap of paper into the box
of sovereigns, merely sending George my love along with the money; I
remember also dropping the box into a hole in a tree, which I blazed, and
towards which I drew a line of wood-ashes. I seem to see a poor unhinged
creature gazing moodily for hours into a fire which he heaps up now and
again with wood. There is not a breath of air; Nature sleeps so calmly
that she dares not even breathe for fear of waking; the very river has
hushed his flow. Without, the starlit calm of a summer's night in a
great wilderness; within, a hurricane of wild and incoherent thoughts
battling with one another in their fury to fall upon him and rend him--and
on the other side the great wall of mountain, thousands of children
praying at their mother's knee to this poor dazed thing. I suppose this
half delirious wretch must have been myself. But I must have been more
ill when I left England than I thought I was, or Erewhon would not have
broken me down as it did."

No doubt he was right. Indeed it was because Mr. Cathie and his doctor
saw that he was out of health and in