ike the
little silver-striped adder that I found one day, mangled by some
passing cart, in the yellow dust of the road. Her lips were stretched
for ever in that same flat, immutable smile. When she moved her head,
you caught the gleam of a string of gold beads, half-hidden in a crease
of her stout throat. She had still a coarsely handsome figure, she was
called a fine looking woman; and every afternoon she sat and sewed by
the window of her parlor, dressed in a tight, black gown, with
immaculate cuffs about her thick wrists. The neighbors--thin, overworked
women, with numerous children--were too tired and busy to be envious.
They thought her very genteel. Her husband, before his last illness, had
kept a large grocery store in a village on the South side of the Island.
It gave her a presumptive right to the difference in her ways, to the
stuff gown of an afternoon, to the use of butter instead of lard in her
cookery, to the extra thickness and brightness of her parlor carpet.

For days I steeped my soul in the peace and quiet. In the long mornings
I went down the grassy path to the beach, and lay on the yellow sands,
as lost to the world as if I were in some vast solitude. I had had a
wound in my life, and with the natural instinct of all hurt creatures, I
wanted to hide and get close to the earth until it healed. I knew that
it must heal at last, but there are certain natures in which mental
torture must have a physical outcome, and we are happier afterward if we
have called in no Greek chorus of friends to the tragedy, to witness and
sing how the body comported itself under the soul's woe. But there is no
sense of shame when deep cries are wrenched from the throat under the
free sky, with only the sea to answer. One can let the body take half
the burden of pain, and writhe on the breast of the earth without
reproach. I took this relief that nature meant for such as I, wearing
myself into the indifference of exhaustion, to which must sooner or
later ensue the indifference brought by time. Sometimes a flock of small
brown sandbirds watched me curiously from a sodden bank of sea-weed,
but that was all.

This story is not of myself, however, or of the pain which I cured in
this natural way, and which is but a memory now.

One gray morning a white mist settled heavily, and I could see but a
short distance on the dark waters for the fog. A fresh access of the
suffering which I was fighting, the wildness of my grief and str