stering trade-winds, and a mute
fidelity in the shining sands, treacherous to all but him. With such
bandogs to lie in wait for trespassers, should he not be grateful?

If no bitterness was awakened by the repeated avowal of the
unfaithfulness of the woman he loved, it was because he had always made
the observation and experience of others give way to the dominance of
his own insight. No array of contradictory facts ever shook his belief
or unbelief; like all egotists, he accepted them as truths controlled
by a larger truth of which he alone was cognizant. His simplicity,
which was but another form of his egotism, was so complete as to baffle
ordinary malicious cunning, and so he was spared the experience and
knowledge that come to a lower nature, and help debase it.

Exercise and the stimulus of the few wants that sent him hunting or
fishing kept up his physical health. Never a lover of rude freedom or
outdoor life his sedentary predilections and nice tastes kept him from
lapsing into barbarian excess; never a sportsman he followed the chase
with no feverish exaltation. Even dumb creatures found out his secret,
and at times, stalking moodily over the upland, the brown deer and elk
would cross his path without fear or molestation, or, idly lounging in
his canoe within the river bar, flocks of wild fowl would settle within
stroke of his listless oar. And so the second winter of his hermitage
drew near its close, and with it came a storm that passed into local
history, and is still remembered. It uprooted giant trees along the
river, and with them the tiny rootlets of the life he was idly
fostering.

The morning had been fitfully turbulent, the wind veering several
points south and west, with suspicions lulls, unlike the steady onset
of the regular southwest trades. High overhead the long manes of
racing cirro stratus streamed with flying gulls and hurrying
water-fowl; plover piped incessantly, and a flock of timorous
sand-pipers sought the low ridge of his cabin, while a wrecking crew of
curlew hastily manned the uprooted tree that tossed wearily beyond the
bar. By noon the flying clouds huddled together in masses, and then
were suddenly exploded in one vast opaque sheet over the heavens. The
sea became gray, and suddenly wrinkled and old. There was a dumb,
half-articulate cry in the air,--rather a confusion of many sounds, as
of the booming of distant guns, the clangor of a bell, the trampling of
many wave