THE TEXAN HUNTRESS. 275 
depict them with an unfaltering hand, for the lessons they 
should convey. 
The rude and hardy sports in which my boyhood, youth 
and opening manhood had been spent with such devotion, had 
yet not been sufficiently engrossing to divert or turn aside 
that morbid revulsion of the passions, which inevitably super- 
venes upon their first fiery introduction—at this critical period 
—to reality outside the holiday world of Dreams and Books. 
Indeed, I had scarcely stepped beyond the threshold of 
the closet, and found myself under the sun, out in the broad 
world, before the sickness of this spiritual revulsion came over 
me. I felt the thin wings of the delicate visions I had nur- 
tured in, scholastic shades, wilt and curl up, as I have seen 
the dew-flower petals beneath a flaming nogn. Ah! a grievous 
sickness—almost unto death—that was, when I saw those 
exquisite frail things all dying. 
They were the creatures of the soul’s first spring-time, of 
softer glowing hues, and breathing fresher odors than ever 
come again; and what the sun had spared—when the tink- 
ling trample of the curt, gray frost went over them—were 
snapped and strewn—stark in their own beauties—dead ! 
The glory and the joy passed from the earth with them—a 
huge desolation spinning on its poles—I stood upon its wide 
blank, deaf and blind, with one word burning in ghastly light 
through darkened brain and soul!—a curse! It was a pur- 
pose—it was a savage ecstacy, to live and curse all,—God, 
woman, man! to walk through life until I chose to die, hating 
and defiang. I laughed hoarsely as I hugged the pleasant 
madness to my heart. O, rare and mirthfulest conceit! Re- 
venge. 
Hate! scorn! Ha! ha! I shouted in my bitterness; right 
royal brotherhood for the stout spirit. What a carnival the 
game of life will be to us—only we wont throw sugar plums, 
J lie down upon the grass and sob and pule like a tripping 
Cupid over his crushed flowers? Manly employment that! 
