THE TEXAN HUNTRESS. 299 



like a madman across the plains, merely because he considered 

 himself lost, without taking time to cut the throat of the 

 deer he had just shot, or to cooly examine his immediate 

 neighborhood, when, in that event, he might have seen me 

 step forth, whose eye had been upon him, and relieve him 

 from all trouble. You need to trust Nature more, and through 

 her learn to trust yourself ! She is full of amenities, and in 

 the mild grandeur of her moods is merciful to all but human 

 weakness. As she represents all that we know of God's 

 physical to us, we must trust her in such relations as we trust 

 him in the spiritual. You are old enough and know enough 

 to have found your way back to your friends, if you had 

 stopped to think a moment. 



" You did not trust, and though you might not have fled 

 from mortal foe, you did fly from your own imaginations, for 

 I was an unseen witness ! I saw you scurry off, and before 

 I understood the cause, you were beyond the reach of any 

 sound I could produce. I laughed, and pitied you, but 

 found you this morning by accident.'* 



" You are a strange person ! What is the meaning of all 

 these things you say to me?" 



" Meaning, boy ? That you children of civilization imagine 

 yourselves educated when you have talked with books in 

 dingy closets, and grown pale in the stagnant air in which 

 your morbid dreams are generated, along with dull diseases ! 

 You have only commenced the true life. Neither the physi- 

 cal or spiritual are yet developed in you, although you may 

 be what you call learned!" 



"That I disclaim!" I could not help saying, with false 

 and unnecessary modesty. 



" Then, it is nothing to your credit ! One kind of learn- 

 ing is as necessary as another !" she continued, with no change 

 of intonation, but in a severe, rapid manner. 



" You should know books as well as Nature. One is God's 

 Book and the other man's !" 



