es filled with tears; for I realized what I had
done, and for the first time I felt repentance and sorrow.

I learned a great many new words that day. I do not remember what they
all were; but I do know that _mother_, _father_, _sister_, _teacher_,
were among them--words that were to make the world blossom for me, "like
Aaron's rod, with flowers." It would have been difficult to find a
happier child than I was as I lay in my crib at the close of that
eventful day and lived over the joys it had brought me, and for the
first time longed for a new day to come.

3. Mental Effects of Solitude[107]

I spent the greater part of one winter at a point on the Rio Negro,
seventy or eighty miles from the sea. It was my custom to go out every
morning on horseback with my gun, and, followed by one dog, to ride away
from the valley; and no sooner would I climb the terrace and plunge into
the gray universal thicket, than I would find myself as completely alone
as if five hundred instead of only five miles separated me from the
valley and river. So wild and solitary and remote seemed that gray
waste, stretching away into infinitude, a waste untrodden by man, and
where the wild animals are so few that they have made no discoverable
path in the wilderness of thorns.

Not once nor twice nor thrice, but day after day I returned to this
solitude, going to it in the morning as if to attend a festival, and
leaving it only when hunger and thirst and the westering sun compelled
me. And yet I had no object in going--no motive which could be put into
words; for, although I carried a gun, there was nothing to shoot--the
shooting was all left behind in the valley. Sometimes I would pass an
entire day without seeing one mammal and perhaps not more than a dozen
birds of any size. The weather at that time was cheerless, generally
with a gray film of cloud spread over the sky, and a bleak wind, often
cold enough to make my bridle hand quite numb. At a slow pace, which
would have seemed intolerable in other circumstances, I would ride about
for hours at a stretch. On arriving at a hill, I would slowly ride to
its summit, and stand there to survey the prospect. On every side it
stretched away in great undulations, wild and irregular. How gray it all
was! Hardly less so near at hand than on the haze-wrapped horizon, where
the hills were dim and the outline blurred by distance. Descending from
my outlook, I would take up my aimless wanderings again, an