And so the Autumn died slowly, with a
lingering decadence, and shrouded perpetually in mist. I often felt ill,
even then. My body was dressed in weakness. Perhaps already the fever
was upon me. I wish I could know. Was it crawling in my veins? Was it
nestling about my heart and in my brain? Could it be that?...

Certainly during this period life seemed alien to me, and I moved as one
apart in a remote world, full of the music of the burn, and full, too,
of vague clouds. That is so. Looking back, I know it. Still, I cannot be
sure what is the truth. In the late Autumn I paid my last visit to the
burn before my illness seized me. The cold of early Winter was in the
air and a great stillness. It was afternoon when I left the house
walking slowly with my awkward gait. My face, I know, was white and
drawn, and I felt that my lips were twitching. I did not carry my volume
of Goethe in my hand; but, in its place, held an old book on
transcendental magic. The voice of the burn--yes, that alone--had led me
to study this book. So now I took it down to the burn. Why? Had I the
foolish fancy of introducing my live thing of the den to this strange
writing on the black art? Who knows? Perhaps the fever in my veins put
the book into my hand. I shivered in the damp cold as I descended the
steep ground that lay about the water, which that day seemed to roar in
my ears the sentence I had heard so many days and nights. And this time,
as I hearkened, my heart and my brain echoed the last words--"_It might
be so now._" Gaining the edge of the burn, then in heavy spate, I
watched for a while the passage of the foam from rock to rock. I peered
into the pools, clouded with flood water from the hills, and with
whirling or sinking dead leaves. And all my meagre body seemed pulsing
with those everlasting words: "Why not now?" I murmured to myself, with
a sort of silent sneer, too, at my own absurdity. I remember I glanced
furtively around as I spoke. Grey emptiness, grey loneliness, dripping
bare trees through whose branches the mist curled silently, cold rocks,
the cold flood of the swollen burn--such was the blank prospect that met
my eyes.

There was no man near me. There was no one to look at me. I was remote,
hidden in a secret place, and the early twilight was already beginning
to fall. No one could see me. I opened my old and ragged book, or,
rather, let it fall open at a certain page. Upon it I looked for the
hundredth time, and read th