£10 , WILD SCENES AND WILD HUNTERS. 
that if one did not sleep soon he was compelled to think, and 
in connected strains of thought, too. 
Here I sat and mused much; for, in spite of myself and 
all my efforts at sneering, there was something in this woman’s 
wild talk that impressed me,—and in the strange life, man- 
ners and surroundings of this remarkable recluse, that had 
aroused my deepest and most curious sympathy. These were 
new thoughts,—strange ideas—she had spoken. This was a 
new phase of life to me—this isolation—this devotion to a 
fixed purpose—this self-denial, which could sever two persons 
from all the common sympathies of their race, and send them 
off to remote and dangerous solitudes,—change the natural 
relations of the sexes, and exalt them into the incommunica- 
tive and apparently crazed condition of abstraction and de- 
votion to a single idea! : 
“What is this Idea? What do these people hope to ac- 
complish ?’’ I asked myself a thousand times. “They talk 
of social wrongs,—but that is no new story,—it is simply as 
old as society, that those who can find no business of their 
own to attend to, should, and will employ themselves with 
the business of others, and go to work to save the world! 
They commonly make a good speculation of it, and are usually 
corrupt as they are loud-mouthed, vulgar and stupid,—but 
here seems an anomalous case. These people are clearly in 
earnest. Women do not run such risks for nothing, nor do 
men dedicate themselves with such singleness of purpose to 
what they merely expect selfish returns from! I must get at 
this idea—and get at it I will! These persons are evidently 
educated, for silent and abruptly incommunicative as they 
have been since I came, I have heard enough to convince 
me of this much, and unravel this secret I will!” 
Such, I remember, were my musings, when, after having 
been tenderly cared for several days, I found myself equally 
puzzled as at first, to understand what this old man was doing, 
or expected to accomplish. He had made no explanatipns, 
