But the thought is insupportable that Georgiana should not be happy with me at any cost. I divine now the reason of the effort she has long been making to win me from nature; therefore of my own free will I have privately set about changing the character of my life with the idea of suiting it to some other work in which she too may be content. And thus it has come about that during the August now ended--always the month of the year in which my nature will go its solitary way and seek its woodland peace--I have hung about the town as one who is offered for hire to a master whom he has never seen and for a work that he hates to do. Many of the affairs that engage the passions of my fellow-beings are to me as the gray stubble through which I walk in the September fields--the rotting wastage of harvests long since gathered in. At other times I drive myself upon their sharp and piercing conflicts as a bird is blown uselessly again and again by some too strong a wind upon the spikes of the thorn. I hear the angry talk of our farmers and merchants, I listen to the fiery orations of our statesmen and the warning sermons of our divines. (Think of a human creature calling himself a divine.) The troubled ebb and flow of events in Kentucky, the larger movements of unrest throughout the great republic--these have replaced for me the old communings with nature that were full of music and of peace. Evening after evening now I turn my conversations with Georgiana as gayly as I can upon some topic of the time. She is not always pleased with what I style my researches into civilized society. One evening in particular our talk was long and serious, beginning in shallows and then steering for deep waters. "Well, Georgiana," I had said, "Miss Delia Webster has suddenly returned to her home in Vermont." "And who is Miss Delia Webster?" she had inquired, with unmistakable acidity. "Miss Delia Webster is the lady who was sentenced to the State penitentiary for abducting our silly old servants into Ohio. But the jury of Kentucky noblemen who returned the verdict--being married men, and long used to forgiving a woman anything--petitioned the governor to pardon Miss Delia on the ground that she belongs to the sex that can do no wrong--and be punished for it. Whereupon the governor, seasoned to the like large experience, pardoned the lady. Whereupon Miss Webster, having passed a few weeks in the penitentiary, left, as I stated, for her home in Vermont, followed by her father, who does not, however, seem to have been able to overtake her." "If she'd been a man, now," suggested Georgiana. "If she'd been a man she would have shared the fortunes of her principal, the Reverend Mr. Fairbanks, who has _not_ returned to his home in Ohio, and will not--for fifteen years." "Do you think it an agreeable subject of conversation?" inquired Georgiana.