morrow I should be some miles away, with a strong probability of
never returning.

A sudden coolness brought me out of my abstraction, and looking up I
found myself entering the deep shadows of the ravine. The day was
stifling; and this transition from the pitiless, visible heat of the
parched fields to the cool gloom, heavy with pungency of cedars and
vocal with twittering of the birds that had been driven to its leafy
asylum, was exquisitely refreshing. I looked for my mystery, as
usual, but not finding the ravine in a communicative mood,
dismounted, led my sweating animal into the undergrowth, tied him
securely to a tree and sat down upon a rock to meditate.

I began bravely by analyzing my pet superstition about the place.
Having resolved it into its constituent elements I arranged them in
convenient troops and squadrons, and collecting all the forces of my
logic bore down upon them from impregnable premises with the thunder
of irresistible conclusions and a great noise of chariots and general
intellectual shouting. Then, when my big mental guns had overturned
all opposition, and were growling almost inaudibly away on the
horizon of pure speculation, the routed enemy straggled in upon their
rear, massed silently into a solid phalanx, and captured me, bag and
baggage. An indefinable dread came upon me. I rose to shake it off,
and began threading the narrow dell by an old, grass-grown cow-path
that seemed to flow along the bottom, as a substitute for the brook
that Nature had neglected to provide.

The trees among which the path straggled were ordinary, well-behaved
plants, a trifle perverted as to trunk and eccentric as to bough, but
with nothing unearthly in their general aspect. A few loose