Erema

, without getting further. But my father said that we must come right, if we made up our minds to go long enough. We had been in among all shapes, and want of shapes, of dreariness, th

d been worse than to drag one's way through a stubbly bed of sting-nettles. But now the quick sting of the sun was gone, and his power

glaciers, spangled with bright snow, and shodden with eternal forest. Before us lay the broad, luxuriant plains of California, checkered with more tints than any other piece of earth can show, sle

rd the blue enchantment of ecstatic living water. But, to my surprise, he staggered back, and his face grew as white as the distant snow. I managed

as if we were fallen back ten years,

and to let him know where it was, it

spoke again, "but it has not been from want of love. Some

g into a hazy disk, inefficient, but benevolent. Underneath him depth of night was waiting to come upward (after letting him fall through) and stain his track with redness. Already the arms of darkness grew in readiness to receive him: his upper arc was pure and keen, but the

ty which comes to those who know what human life is through continual human death. Although, in the matter of bodily strength, he was little past the prime of life, his long and abundant hair was white, and his broad and upright forehead marked with the meshes of the net of care. But drought and famine and long fatigue had failed even now to change or weake

inst the deepening background. He gazed as if the course of life lay vanishing below him, while level land and waters drew the breadth of s

w cold they were, and even tremulous. "Let us run, let us run, my dear father!" I cried. "Delicious water!

I must hurry to show you what you have to do, my child. For once, at the end of my life,

distant landmark fell away. His face, which had been so pale before, became of a deadly whiteness, and he breathed wit

every thing to me! What a brute I was to let you do it! Bu

he understood it; but he firmly lifted his

mind such, a wretch as I am! Father, only

ds; and he kept on saying, "My child! m

ve to keep more near to him through the night, to cherish his failing warmth, and quicken the slow, laborious, harassed breath. From time to time he tried to pray to God for me and for himself; but every time his mind began to wander and to sli

y. Go on your way, and save you

them lissome with a soft, light rubbing. I whispered into his ear my name, that he might

quite dead. And in the anguish of my sobbing, little things came home to me, a thousand little things that showed how quietly he had prepared for this, and provided for me only. Cold despair and self-reproach and s

om me. How I arose, or what I did, or what I thought, is nothing now. Such times are not for talking of. How many hearts of anguish

have made me sick. I opened my father's knapsack, and a pang of new misery seized me. There lay nearly all his rations, which he had made pretense to eat as he gave me mine from time to time. He had starved himself; since he failed of his mark, an

t mercy that can fall on truly hopeless misery. Screams of ravenous maws and flaps of fetid wings came clos