nt his vengeance, and paused, snorting and wild-eyed, to
take breath, he looked down upon a mangled shape that no longer
struggled or stirred or even breathed. Then the last of his righteous
fury faded out. The sight and smell of the blood sickened him, and in a
kind of terror he turned away. For a few hesitating moments he stared
about his little retreat and then, finding it had grown hateful to him,
he forsook it, and pushed onward up the edge of the stream, between the
black, impending walls of the forest.

[Illustration: "THE SOUTHWARD JOURNEYING DUCKS, WHICH WOULD DROP WITH
LOUD QUACKING AND SPLASHING INTO THE SHALLOWS"]

About daybreak he came out on the flat, marshy shores of a shrunken
lake, the unstirred waters of which gleamed violet and pale-gold beneath
the twisting coils and drifting plumes of white vapour. All around the
lake stood the grim, serried lines of the firs, under a sky of
palpitating opal. The marshes, in their autumn colouring of burnt gold
and pinky olive, with here and there a little patch of enduring
emerald, caught the wanderer's fancy with a faint reminder of home. Here
was pasture, here was sweet water, here was room to get away from the
oppressive mystery of the woods. He halted to rest and recover himself;
and in the clear, tonic air, so cold that every morning the edges of the
lake were crisped with ice, the aching red gashes on his flank speedily
healed.

He had been at the lake about ten days, and was beginning to grow
restlessly impatient of the unchanging solitude, before anything new
took place. A vividly conspicuous object in his gleaming whiteness as he
roamed the marshes, pasturing or galloping up and down the shore with
streaming mane and tail, he had been seen and watched and wondered at by
all the wild kindreds who had their habitations in the woods about the
lake. But they had all kept carefully out of his sight, regarding him
with no less terror than wonder; and he imagined himself utterly alone,
except for the fish-hawks, and the southward journeying ducks, which
would drop with loud quacking and splashing into the shallows after
sunset, and the owls, the sombre hooting of which disturbed him every
night. Several times, too, from the extreme head of the lake he heard a
discordant call, a great braying bellow, which puzzled him, and brought
him instantly to his feet by a note of challenge in it; but the issuer
of this hoarse defiance never revealed himself. Sometimes he