Before any bird awoke, and while the wood was morning gray, the Outliers began to move westward¹ next day from Leaping Water. Morning did not break but there was a widening of the gray space, a warming of the slight wind, and then the chill that settled into weeping fog. Blunt crowns of hills peered at us through the parting mist, and seemed mysteriously to move behind it and at the next lifting peer upon us from another quarter. Dim files of trees marched down upon us from obscurity and marched away again. Far to the left we heard the rain charging the river cañon, and the stir of invisible cohorts enfilading behind the locked ranges.

I could not make out where we were, except that our general movement was toward 296lower ground, and from the position of a pale yellow blur³ that appeared in the sky about midday, I gathered that we had moved south and west. In this space of half obscurity, wet mist, sodden⁴ grass, pale shadow and pale sun, the Far-Folk moved with us. Neither they nor Herman nor I cared to ask what was meant toward us, nor speculated as to what we should do about it. I suppose no philosophy could have devised more justice in the end than the working of their own natures had brought to pass. Whoever had met death on this occasion had met it so much of his own act that the event left no sense of mal-adjustment, and with it died both remorse⁵ and recrimination.

We had reached by this time, Herman and I, a large faith in the reasonableness of nature. Whatever came to us, we felt the processes of life rising to heal it like the sap to a tree’s scar.

We kept close together, saying little, going all that day in intermitting fog and rain, until the sky cleared well toward sunset. We had come to a halt an hour past on a wild open headland, and saw huge uncouth⁶ shapes of cloud hurrying to caverns⁷ of the sun. Fog lay thick in the hollows, hills islanded above 297it; as it cleared and sunk and the dry land appeared we saw how large and good the country was; hills upon hills, and hills beyond, wooded and bare, broken and rolling land. Nowhere was there a man trace, no smoke going up from the cañons, nor window lights below the trees. To the west the fog lay unpierced, stretching seaward, level and roughed on the surface like waves, beginning to take a red

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