its withered finger onward. All my care was to be farther from home
each night than the preceding morning.



A FELLOW-TRAVELLER.

One day at noontide, when the sun had burst suddenly out of a cloud,
and threatened to dissolve me, I looked round for shelter, whether
of tavern, cottage, barn, or shady tree. The first which offered
itself was a wood,--not a forest, but a trim plantation of young
oaks, growing just thick enough to keep the mass of sunshine out,
while they admitted a few straggling beams, and thus produced the
most cheerful gloom imaginable. A brook, so small and clear, and
apparently so cool, that I wanted to drink it up, ran under the road
through a little arch of stone without once meeting the sun in its
passage from the shade on one side to the shade on the other. As
there was a stepping-place over the stone wall and a path along the
rivulet, I followed it and discovered its source,--a spring gushing
out of an old barrel.

In this pleasant spot I saw a light pack suspended from the branch
of a tree, a stick leaning against the trunk, and a person seated on
the grassy verge of the spring, with his back towards me. He was a
slender figure, dressed in black broadcloth, which was none of the
finest nor very fashionably cut. On hearing my footsteps he started
up rather nervously, and, turning round, showed the face of a young
man about my own age, with his finger in a volume which he had been
reading till my intrusion. His book was evidently a pocket Bible.
Though I piqued myself at that period on my great penetration into