can live without too much thought of
life."

The sheen of the river had died out, and the creek was only a common
stream lit with the high moon, and bordered far off to the west with the
low indistinguishable country. We drove in silence down the valley along
that shelf of road under the land. The broken bluffs on the left rose
into immense slopes of rolling prairie, and magnified by the night
atmosphere into majesty, heavy with deep darkness in their folds, stood
massive and vast in the dusk moonlight, like a sea. Then fell on me and
grew with strange insistence the sense of this everlasting mounded power
of the earth, like the rise and subsidence of ocean in an element of
slower and more awful might. The solid waste began to loom and lift,
almost with the blind internal strength of the whirl of the planet
through space. Deeper into the shadow we plunged with every echoing
tread of the hoofs. The lair of some mysterious presence was about
us,--unshaped, unrealized, as in some place of antique awe before the
time of temples or of gods. It seemed a corporal thing. If I stretched
out my hand I should touch it like the ground. It came out from all the
black rifts, it rolled from the moonlit distinct heights, it filled the
chill air,--it was an envelopment--it would be an engulfment--horse and
man we were sinking in it. Then it was--most in all my days--that I felt
dense mystery overwhelming me. "O infinite earth," I thought, "our
unknowing mother, our unknowing grave!"--"What is it?" he said, feeling
my wrist straighten where it lay on his shoulder, and the tremor and the
hand seeking him. Was it a premonition? "Nothing," I answered, and did
not tell him; but he began to cheer me with lighter talk, and win me
back to the levels of life, and under his sensitive and loving ways, the
excitement of the ride died out, and an hour later, after midnight, we
drove into the silent town. We put the ponies up, praising them with
hand and voice; and then he took both my hands in his and said, "The
truest thing you ever said was what you wrote me, 'We live each others'
lives.'" That was his thanks.

O brave and tender heart, now long lapped under the green fold of that
far prairie in his niche of earth! How often I see him as in our first
days,--the boy of seventeen summers, lying on his elbows over his
Thackeray, reading by the pictures, and laughing to himself hour after
hour; and many a prairie adventure, many happy days and fortun