"No! O no!" he said to me, "call it anything but courage! I felt--I don't
want to be sentimental--I'm sure I was not sentimental at the time, but--I
felt as though I were a murderer. All I knew was that it had to be done. I
trembled like a thief. I had to stoop twice before I could take up the
axe, and I was so cold my teeth chattered. When I lifted the first blow I
didn't know where it was going to fall. But it struck as true as a die,
and then I flew at it. I never chopped so fast or clean in my life. I
wasn't fierce; I was as full of self-delight as an overpraised child. And
yet when something delayed me an instant I found I was still shaking.
Courage," said he, "O no; I know what it was, and I knew then. But I had
no choice; it was my last chance."

I told him that anyone might have thought him a madman chopping up his
last chance.

"Maybe so," he replied, "but I wasn't; it was the one sane thing I could
do;" and he went on to tell me that when night fell the tallest fire that
ever leapt from those sands blazed from Sweetheart's piled ribs and keel.

It was proof to him of his having been shrewd, he said, that for many days
he felt no repentance of the act nor was in the least lonely. There was an
infinite relief merely in getting clean away from the huge world of men,
with all its exactions and temptations and the myriad rebukes and rebuffs
of its crass propriety and thrift. He had endured solitude enough in it;
the secret loneliness of a spiritual bankruptcy. Here was life begun over,
with none to make new debts to except nature and himself, and no
besetments but his own circumvented propensities. What humble, happy
masterhood! Each dawn he rose from dreamless sleep and leaped into the
surf as into the embrace of a new existence. Every hour of day brought