r take so many fish out of a brook in one day before? No, of
course you didn't. Well, that's why. I told you it would be a rough
expedition; but I thought you came here to rough it. You didn't expect
balls and a casino, did you? You were here last May."

"Last May I saw nothing as bad as this to-day. You haven't been playing
it on me, I hope? Jim, have you got any grudge against me?"

"What should I have? You're deucedly suspicious and sensitive--far more
so than I was with you. I believe I let you play on me to your heart's
content, and never complained--did I?"

"Jim, I don't like this. There's a change in you: Hodge said so, and I
didn't believe him. You're not the same man."

"O, we all change--from year to year, and from day to day. But I ought
never to have left these woods, Bob, and that's the truth. You should
have let me stay here as I was."

"I meant it in all kindness, for your good, Jim. Surely you'll do me the
justice to acknowledge that."

"No doubt. But your philanthropic experiments are apt to be damnably
expensive to the patient."

"You couldn't be much worse than you were, according to your own
account. Any change ought to have been for the better."

"That was your assumption. Do I strike you as being changed for the
better?"

"Well, no, you don't--not to put too fine a point upon it."

He certainly does not. His whole manner is altered. His former
gentleness has given way to rough harshness. You have seen how he treats
me. It may be his best, as he says; if so, his best is far from good.
His bitterness used to be, if I may say so, in the abstract, and leveled
against abstractions; now it seems to have a painfully concrete
character and aim. His estrangement from the scheme of things, or from
his kind at least, was purely intellectual, leaving his heart no more
affected than the heart usually is by brain-disorders; now it is moral.
He is like a man tormented by remorse, or regrets as savage. But I think
I know a cure for his complaint.

After a pause he said, "I don't want to blame you, Bob, and I don't
propose to whine. Nor was it any great matter what came to me, wherever
it might come from. I thought I was done with the world, and had nothing
to fear from it, except being bored and disgusted. There was only one
thing I cared about, and that I supposed I could keep. I was mistaken.
It was my little ewe lamb--all I had; and they took it from me."

"I thought your live stock was confined