she
looked very anxiously into my eyes, and said:

"'Deed, I just think ye're goin' mad."

Before leaving the farm, I experienced an incident which, although of
a different character, equalled in its intensity and beauty my
awakening to what, for lack of a better term, I called a religious
life.

A young lady from the city was visiting at the home of the land
steward, and, as I knew more about the woods and the inhabitants
thereof than anybody else on the farm, I was often ordered to take
visitors around. The land steward's daughter accompanied the young
lady on her first visit to the roads; but afterward she came alone,
and we traversed the ravine from one end to the other. We collected
flowers and specimens, and watched the wild animals.

I had never seen such a beautiful human being. Her voice was soft and
musical. She wore her hair loosely down her back, and was a perfect
picture of health and beauty.

One day I lay at full length on my back, asleep by the edge of the
wood. When I awoke, this city girl was standing at my side. I jumped
to my feet and stood erect, and I remember distinctly the emotions
that swept through me. I was startled at first, startled as I had been
on a previous occasion when, at a sharp turn in the footpath in the
ravine, I met a fawn. I remembered my first impulse then was for a
word, a word of conciliation, for I was fascinated by the beauty of
the graceful beast. Graceful as a nymph it stood there, nerves
strained like a bow bent for the discharge of an arrow, its head
poised in air, fire shooting from its eyes. It remained only for an
instant, and then with a frightened plunge it cleared the clump of
laurel bushes and disappeared.

When I stood before this beautiful city girl, I remembered the fawn,
and expected the girl instantly to vanish out of my sight. There was
something of the fawn in her graceful form, some of the fire in her
blue eyes, and in her girlish laugh a suggestion of the freedom of the
mountain and glen. I think it was in that moment of intensity that I
crossed the bridge which separates the boy from the man. An impassable
gulf was fixed between this girl's station in life and mine. She was
the daughter of a florist, and I was the son of a cobbler.

She returned home shortly after this, and I was promoted from the
potato field to be a groom's helper in the stables of "the master." We
called his residence the "big house." It was like a castle on the
Rhine. A ve