out in the clear blue of the sky]

Well, we cannot remain steadily upon the heights. At least I cannot,
and would not if I could. After I have been out about so long on such an
adventure as this, something lets go inside of me, and I come down out
of the mountain--and yet know deeply that I have been where the bush was
burning; and have heard the Voice in the Fire.

So it was yesterday morning. I realized suddenly that I was
hungry--commonly, coarsely hungry. My whole attention, I was going to
say my whole soul, shifted to the thought of ham and eggs! This may seem
a tremendous anti-climax, but it is, nevertheless, a sober report of
what happened. At the first onset of this new mood, the ham-and-eggs
mood, let us call it, I was a little ashamed or abashed at the
remembrance of my wild flights, and had a laugh at the thought of myself
floundering around in the marshes and fields a mile from home, when
Harriet, no doubt, had breakfast waiting for me! What absurd,
contradictory, inconsistent, cowardly creatures we are, anyway!

The house seemed an inconceivable distance away, and the only real thing
in the world the gnawing emptiness under my belt. And I was wet to my
knees, and the tangled huckleberry bashes and sheep laurel and hardback
I had passed through so joyously a short time before now clung heavily
about my legs as I struggled through them. And the sun was hot and
high--and there were innumerable small, black buzzing flies.

To cap the climax, whom should I meet as I was crossing the fence into
the lower land but my friend Horace, He had been out early looking for a
cow that had dropped her calf in the woods, and was now driving them
slowly up the lane, the cow a true pattern of solicitous motherhood, the