300 WILD SCENES AND WILD HUNTERS. 



"Tliat sounds polemical!" sneered I, having by this time 

 become interested in her dogmatism, and feeling a sudden 

 accession of the old profane propensity for cynicism. 



" I am no vulgar heretic. I believe in all the sacrednesses 

 of humanity, but I believe as well in those of Nature. . The 

 religion of the Bible is, perhaps, more of a religion to me than 

 to you, — but the religion of Nature is an essential part of it, 

 and, with me, the base, of course, as Eden had its base upon 

 the earth." 



"Well!" thought I, to myself, "Here's a droll preacher I 

 have met with, any how !" 



" But, you think it strange I should tell you that you do not 

 know your own life, because you suffered your imagination to 

 make a fool of you, in conditions from which your experiences 

 showed you no mode of escape which you could understand ?" 



"Yes!" 



""Well, that you may understand what I mean, — should 

 you not have known how to read this great page of continent- 

 stretching plain, as well as that other smaller page of your 

 Human Learning, let it belong to what tome it may ?" 



" Yes ; but you remember I have not had time yet to learn !" 



" Then confess yourself a child ! I have been taught to read 

 your books, and have learned something of them, too. I can 

 read the other book as well ; and, instead of the faded decay 

 of the mere scholar, you see the bronzed seams of a sterner 

 and more hardy life. Woman as you say I am — I will out- 

 live a dozen of them in the Life of Truth. Had I been cast 

 upon the middle of the desert of Sahara by such a tornado as 

 you met with last night, I should not have attempted to take a 

 course until I had seen the sun rise. This would have been 

 a base for faith, for observation, for calculation — nothing 

 would have escaped me, however minute — from the character 

 of a cloud to the position of the low sand-waves fixed around 

 me, to tell how the prevailing wind had left them to wait its 

 next coming — and that wind would tell a pregnant story, 



