300 WILD SCENES AND WILD HUNTERS. 
“That 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. 
“Tam oo 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 mere hardy life. Woman as you say I am—lI wili 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, 
