my health deteriorated. I ate
little and slept little and grew thin and weak. When I looked down
on the dark, glassy forest pool, where Rima would look no more to see
herself so much better than in the small mirror of her lover's pupil, it
showed me a gaunt, ragged man with a tangled mass of black hair
falling over his shoulders, the bones of his face showing through the
dead-looking, sun-parched skin, the sunken eyes with a gleam in them
that was like insanity.

To see this reflection had a strangely disturbing effect on me. A
torturing voice would whisper in my ear: "Yes, you are evidently going
mad. By and by you will rush howling through the forest, only to drop
down at last and die; and no person will ever find and bury your bones.
Old Nuflo was more fortunate in that he perished first."

"A lying voice!" I retorted in sudden anger. "My faculties were never
keener than now. Not a fruit can ripen but I find it. If a small bird
darts by with a feather or straw in its bill I mark its flight, and
it will be a lucky bird if I do not find its nest in the end. Could a
savage born in the forest do more? He would starve where I find food!"

"Ay, yes, there is nothing wonderful in that," answered the voice. "The
stranger from a cold country suffers less from the heat, when days
are hottest, than the Indian who knows no other climate. But mark the
result! The stranger dies, while the Indian, sweating and gasping for
breath, survives. In like manner the low-minded savage, cut off from all
human fellowship, keeps his faculties to the end, while your finer brain
proves your ruin."

I cut from a tree a score of long, blunt thorns, tough and black as
whalebone, and drove them through a strip of wood in which I had burnt a
row of holes to receive them, and made myself a comb, and combed out my
long, tangled hair to improve my appearance.

"It is not the tangled condition of your hair," persisted the voice,
"but your eyes, so wild and strange in their expression, that show the
approach of madness. Make your locks as smooth as you like, and add a
garland of those scarlet, star-shaped blossoms hanging from the bush
behind you--crown yourself as you crowned old Cla-cla--but the crazed
look will remain just the same."

And being no longer able to reply, rage and desperation drove me to an
act which only seemed to prove that the hateful voice had prophesied
truly. Taking up a stone, I hurled it down on the water to shatter the
im