Not many weeks after the preceding incidents, Bergan went out, early one afternoon, for a long, solitary¹ ramble². It was not his wont³ to leave his office before dusk, but his head ached with study, and his heart with loneliness and discouragement; an intolerable weariness and irksomeness had taken possession of him; his book seemed meaningless, and his brain paralyzed; there was nothing for it but to turn from the world of thought, that had suddenly grown so insufferably arid⁵ and dead, to the living, breathing world of nature. Forest, and field, and wave, if they could not give him intelligent sympathy, could at least furnish him gentle distraction⁶.

And, oftentimes, there was a subtile harmony, almost amounting to sympathy, between his lonely moods, and the soft, rich, yet melancholy⁷, Southern landscape,—for melancholy it always seemed to him, though that effect may have been partly owing to the gray medium of isolation⁸ and depression through which he viewed it. But, whatever its origin, this gentle mournfulness was the landscape's consummate⁹ charm,—at least, for any burdened human heart. It is possible that Eden wore a soft grace of pensive¹⁰ beauty, after the fall, which Adam and Eve, wandering back thither¹¹, would have counted a dearer delight, in their then mood, than its old, unshadowed brightness.

On his way out, Bergan found Nix stretched at full length across the threshold. With the usual preference of his race for masculine over feminine society, the dog had early attached himself to the young man, as much as was consistent with a different ownership. He now rose, shook himself, wagged his tail, and looked wistfully in Bergan's face. Meeting with no rebuff, he made bold to follow him.

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