lap the neck of this wise beast when he
found himself on solid land. The ford farther up was much less
dangerous; and so once again the reunited party held on its way.

Then here was the Geinig--no longer the pretty and picturesque river
that he knew, but a boiling and surging torrent sweeping in red wrath
down its narrow and rocky channel. The farther heights, too, that now
came into view, had lost their wonted pale and ethereal hues: there were
no soft cloud-stains on the purple slopes of heather--a darkness dwelt
over the land. As he gradually got up into that wilder country, the
gloom grew more intense, the desolation more awful. The roar of the
Geinig was lost now in this dreadful silence. He seemed to have left
behind him all human sympathies and associations--to have forsaken his
kindred and his kind--to have entered a strange world peopled only with
dark phantoms and moving shadows and ghosts. A voiceless solitude, too,
save for the moaning of the wind that came sweeping in bitter blasts
down from the rainy hills. He did not recognize the features of this
melancholy landscape; they had all changed since his last visit; nay,
they were changing under his very eyes, as this or that far mountain-top
receded behind a veil of gray, or a shadow of greater darkness advanced
with stealthy tread along one of those lonely glens. There was something
threatening in the aspect of both earth and sky; something louring,
conspiring, as if some dread fate were awaiting this intruding stranger;
at times he fancied he could hear low-murmuring voices, the first
mutterings of distant thunder. What if some red bolt of lightning were
suddenly to sever this blackness in twain and reveal its hidden and
awful secrets? But no; there was no such friendly or avenging glare; the
brooding skies lay over the sombre valleys, and the gloomy
phantasmagoria slowly changed and changed in that unearthly twilight, as
the mists and the wind and the rain transformed the solid hills and the
straths into intermingling vapors and visions. A spectral world, unreal,
and yet terrible; apparently voiceless and tenantless; and yet somehow
suggesting that there were eyes watching, and vaguely moving and
menacing shapes passing hither and thither before him in the gloom.

During these last few days he had been assuring himself that he would
enter upon this second stalking expedition without any great tremor. It
was only on the first occasion, when everything was