THE TEXAN HUNTRESS. 281 
idiosyncracy of this case, as set forth, to be common to one 
of the necessary stages of the inner life’ 8 development. Suf- 
fice it! To the frontier I did go,—and now for the story of 
my adventurings there. 
The incidents I am about to give are some of them familiar 
to leading men of Texas, though they have never been related 
in print. On my way out I had stopped to visit at the house 
of a friend, who was a planter, living high up on the Brazos 
River. Our time was principally occupied in hunting. AsI 
had just arrived in the country, the abundant sport afforded 
by the numbers and variety of the game, with which it might 
be said literally to swarm, afforded a diversion to my morbid 
feeling, and kept me in a continued state of eager excitement. 
I was on my horse the greater part of the time. 
Though not a raw woodsman, so far as making my way 
through the heavy forests of the West was concerned, yet 
finding myself’ for the first time upon the vast and unaccus- 
tomed expanse of the Southern Prairies, I was for a long 
time surprised that though excessively reckless, I should be 
here much perplexed, and even timid, in attempting to find 
my way. 
The land-marks are so different, as well as the modes of 
using them, from those to which I had been accustomed, that 
I was frequently confused and overwhelmed with awe on 
finding myself left in the vicissitudes of the hunt, alone amidst 
the illimitable solitudes, with no experienced eye to see for 
me the course, where all was trackless.. 
When I would thus get “turned round,” as it is called, 
and the consciousness that I had lost my course, would drive 
the blood to my heart: the startled sense of the revulsion is 
. difficult to describe. Body and soul would seem for a moment 
as if sinking under the weight of a drear solemnity, and then 
the returning blood would leap back to the brow, thrilling every 
fibre with a shudder. A thousand stories of bloody deaths 
under the reeking scalping-knife of savage hordes, met in the 
