child,--he could not look upon her,--he
could not touch his lips to her cheek; nay, there would sometimes come
into his soul such frightful suggestions that he would hurry from the
room lest the hinted thought should become a momentary madness and he
should lift his hand against the helpless infant which owed him life.

In those miserable days he used to wander all over The Mountain in his
restless endeavor to seek some relief for inward suffering in outward
action. He had no thought of throwing himself from the summit of any
of the broken cliffs, but he clambered over them recklessly, as having
no particular care for his life. Sometimes he would go into the
accursed district where the venomous reptiles were always to be
dreaded, and court their worst haunts, and kill all he could come near
with a kind of blind fury that was strange in a person of his gentle
nature.

One overhanging cliff was a favorite haunt of his. It frowned upon his
home beneath in a very menacing way; he noticed slight seams and
fissures that looked ominous;--what would happen, if it broke off some
time or other and came crashing down on the fields and roofs below? He
thought of such a possible catastrophe with a singular indifference,
in fact with a feeling almost like pleasure. It would be such a swift
and thorough solution of this great problem of life he was working out
in ever-recurring daily anguish! The remote possibility of such a
catastrophe had frightened some timid dwellers beneath The Mountain to
other places of residence; here the danger was most imminent, and yet
he loved to dwell upon the chances of its occurrence. Danger is often
the best _counter-irritant_ in cases of mental suffering; he found a
solace in careless exposure of his life, and learned to endure the
trials of each day better by dwelling in imagination on the
possibility that it might be the last for him and the home that was
his.

Time, the great consoler, helped these influences, and he gradually
fell into more easy and less dangerous habits of life. He ceased from
his more perilous rambles. He thought less of the danger from the
great overhanging rocks and forests; they had hung there for
centuries; it was not very likely they would crash or slide in his
time. He became accustomed to all Elsie's strange looks and ways. Old
Sophy dressed her with ruffles round her neck, and hunted up the red
coral branch with silver bells which the little toothless Dudleys had
bit