A JOURNEY TO NATURE 



covered with them like a prehistoric dragon. It 

 seemed to me now, in the serene flare of our 

 wood fire, that in those rabid days I had lit the 

 torch of life at both ends, and was flourishing it 

 madly like a firebrand, while this little shrine was 

 left somewhere to die slowly out in darkness. At 

 such moments Charlie would look up from his 

 book with a passing wonder in his clear blue 

 eyes, as if he had felt the invisible arms touch 

 ing him. 



When a man comes to this condition, it is 

 absolutely necessary that he should tell it to some 

 one. To arrive in a new world and find nobody 

 in it is perilously near to wanting to go back 

 again. The only person who belonged to this 

 new world, who was an integral part of it, and 

 had never heard of any other, was Griselle. The 

 Doctor had coasted it, and thrown over some ob 

 servations that floated about in it like bottles 

 containing valuable memoranda, which I might 

 fish up as the occasion served, but as for talking 

 to the Doctor, that was out of the question, for 

 he always did the talking himself. Gabe was 

 only a statue, erected by the years, and one doesn t 

 talk to bronzes, however historic. Charlie 

 well, Charlie invariably thawed out my state 

 ments into mere intuitions for which there were 

 no words, and they trickled off into warm silences. 



Not being a literary man, I did not keep a 

 private diary for other people to read, and gener 

 ally tore up my letters with a dull obliviousness 

 of future biographers. Griselle was the only 



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