e and
zest. All his old wilderness love rushed back to him, and now after many
months he felt at home.

Strong as he was already new strength flowed into his frame and he threw
back his head, and laughed a low happy laugh. Then rifle at the trail he
ran for miles among the trees from the pure happiness of living, but
noting as he passed with wonderfully keen eyes every trail of a wild
animal and all the forest signs that he knew so well. He ran many miles
and he felt no weariness. Then he threw himself down on Mother Earth,
and rejoiced at her embrace. He lay there a long time, staring up
through the leaves and the shifting sunlight, and he was so still that a
hare hopped through the undergrowth almost at his feet, never taking
alarm. To Henry Ware then the world seemed grand and beautiful, and of
all things in it God had made the wilderness the finest, lingering over
every detail with a loving hand.

He watched the setting of the sun and the coming of the twilight. The
sun was a great blazing ball and the western sky flowed away from it in
circling waves of blue and pink and gold, then long shadows came over
the forest, and the distant trees began to melt together into a gigantic
dark wall. To the dweller in cities all this vast loneliness and
desolation would have been dreary and weird beyond description; he would
have shuddered with superstitious awe, starting in fear at the slightest
sound, but there was no such quality in it for Henry Ware. He saw only
comradeship and the friendly veil of the great creeping shadow. His eye
could pierce the thickest night, and fear, either of the darkness or
things physical, was not in him.

He rose after a while, when the last sign of day was gone, and walked
on, though more slowly. He made no noise as he passed, stepping lightly,
but with sure foot like one with both genius and training for the
wilderness. He knelt at a little brook to slake his thirst, but did not
stop long there. His happiness decreased in nowise. The familiar voices
of the night were speaking to him. He heard the distant hoot of an owl,
a deer rustled in the bush, a lizard scuttled over the leaves, and he
rejoiced at the sounds. He did not think of hunger but toward midnight
he raked some of last year's fallen leaves close to the trunk of a big
tree, lay down upon them, and fell in a few moments into happy and
dreamless sleep.

He awoke with the first rays of the dawn, shot a deer after an hour's
search, a