at first winter, and there I had
hung like a leaf caught on a root in a freshet, an eighteen-year-old
boy, lonely, without older people to whom I could go for advice or
comfort, and filled with dreams, visions and doubts, and with no bright
spot in my frosty days and frostier nights but my visions and dreams.

And I suppose my loneliness, my hardships, my lack of the fireplaces of
York State and the warm rooms that we were used to in a country where
fuel was plentiful, made my visions and dreams more to me than they
otherwise would have been. It is the hermit who loses the world in his
thoughts. And I dreamed of two things--my mother, and Virginia. Of my
mother I found myself thinking with less and less of that keenness of
grief which I had felt at Madison the winter before, and on my road
west; so I used to get out the old worn shoe and the rain-stained letter
she had left for me in the old apple-tree and try to renew my grief so
as to lose the guilty feeling of which I was conscious at the waning
sense of my loss of her. This was a strife against the inevitable; at
eighteen--or at almost any other age, to the healthy mind--it is the
living which calls, not the dead.

In spite of myself, it was Virginia Royall to whom my dreams turned all
the time. Whether in the keen cold of the still nights when the howl of
the wolves came to me like the cries of torment, or in the howling
tempests which roared across my puny hovel like trampling hosts of wild
things, sifting the snow in at my window, powdering the floor, and
making my cattle in their sheds as white as sheep, I went to sleep every
night thinking of her, and thinking I should dream of her--but never
doing so; for I slept like the dead. I held her in my arms again as I
had done the night Ann Gowdy had died back there near Dubuque, all
senseless in her faint; or as I had when I scared the wolves away from
her back along the Old Ridge Road; or as when I had carried her across
the creek back in our Grove of Destiny--and she always, in my dreams,
was willing, and conscious that I held her so tight because I loved her.

I saw her again as she played with her doll under the trees. Again I
rode by her side into Waterloo; and again she ran back to me to bid me
her sweet good-by after I had given her up. Often I did not give her up,
but brought her to my new home, built my house with her to cheer me; and
often I imagined that she was beside me, sheltered from the storm and
ha