se roots, and bound the cooling
leaves to the wounded hand with my handkerchief.

"There," said I. "Fortunately if you feel pain more sensibly than
others, you will recover from it more quickly." And in a few minutes my
companion felt perfectly relieved, and poured out his gratitude with an
extravagance of expression and a beaming delight of countenance which
positively touched me.

"I almost feel," said I, "as I do when I have stilled an infant's
wailing, and restored it smiling to its mother's breast."

"You have done so. I am an infant, and Nature is my mother. Oh, to be
restored to the full joy of life, the scent of wild flowers, the song of
birds, and this air--summer air--summer air!"

I know not why it was, but at that moment, looking at him and hearing
him, I rejoiced that Lilian was not at L----. "But I came out to bathe.
Can we not bathe in that stream?"

"No. You would derange the bandage round your hand; and for all bodily
ills, from the least to the gravest, there is nothing like leaving
Nature at rest the moment we have hit on the means which assist her own
efforts at cure."

"I obey, then; but I so love the water."

"You swim, of course?"

"Ask the fish if it swim. Ask the fish if it can escape me! I delight to
dive down--down; to plunge after the startled trout, as an otter does;
and then to get amongst those cool, fragrant reeds and bulrushes, or
that forest of emerald weed which one sometimes finds waving under clear
rivers. Man! man! could you live but an hour of my life you would know
how horrible a thing it is to die!"

"Yet the dying do not think so; they pass away calm and smiling, as you
will one day."

"I--I! die one day--die!" and he sank on the grass, and buried his face
amongst the herbage, sobbing aloud.

Before I could get through half a dozen words I meant to soothe, he
had once more bounded up, dashed the tears from his eyes, and was again
singing some wild, barbaric chant. Abstracting itself from the appeal to
its outward sense by melodies of which the language was unknown, my mind
soon grew absorbed in meditative conjectures on the singular nature,
so wayward, so impulsive, which had forced intimacy on a man grave and
practical as myself.

I was puzzled how to reconcile so passionate a childishness, so
undisciplined a want of self-control, with an experience of mankind so
extended by travel, with an education desultory and irregular indeed,
but which must, at some time o