om I had already yielded up all the
manlier energies of my nature; but, deeply as I felt the necessity of
loving something less unreal, up to the moment of my joining the
regiment, my heart had never once throbbed for created woman.

"I have already said that, on gaining the summit of the rock, I found
myself in a sort of oasis of the mountains. It was so. Belted on every
hand by bold and precipitous crags, that seemed to defy the approach
even of the wildest animals, and putting utterly at fault the
penetration and curiosity of man, was spread a carpet of verdure, a
luxuriance of vegetation, that might have put to shame the fertility of
the soft breeze-nourished valleys of Italy and Southern France. Time,
however, is not given me to dwell on the mingled beauty and wildness of
a scene, so consonant with my ideas of the romantic and the
picturesque. Let me rather recur to her (although my heart be lacerated
once more in the recollection) who was the presiding deity of the
whole,--the being after whom, had I had the fabled power of Prometheus,
I should have formed and animated the sharer of that sweet wild
solitude, nor once felt that fancy, to whom I was so largely a debtor,
had in aught been cheated of what she had, for a series of years, so
rigidly claimed.

"At about twenty yards from the aperture, and on a bank, formed of
turf, covered with moss, and interspersed with roses and honeysuckles,
sat this divinity of the oasis. She, too, was clad in the Highland
dress, which gave an air of wildness and elegance to her figure that
was in classic harmony with the surrounding scenery. At the moment of
my appearance she was in the act of dressing the wounded shoulder of a
stag, that had recently been shot; and from the broad tartan riband I
perceived attached to its neck, added to the fact of the tameness of
the animal, I presumed that this stag, evidently a favourite of its
mistress, was the same I had fired at and wounded. The rustling I made
among the bushes had attracted her attention; she raised her eyes from
the deer, and, beholding me, started to her feet, uttering a cry of
terror and surprise. Fearing to speak, as if the sound of my own voice
were sufficient to dispel the illusion that fascinated both eye and
heart into delicious tension on her form, yet with my soul kindled into
all that wild uncontrollable love which had been the accumulation of
years of passionate imagining, I stood for some moments as motionless