Day was scarce breaking when I started up and looked around me with a disagreeable feeling of self-reproach: for how easily could an Indian have crept up and done to me while asleep what all the whole tribe could not effect while I was awake! Czar lay motionless, and I did not disturb him, for it might easily happen that his strength alone could bear me away in safety. I went out of the gorge and brought in some dry wood, lit a fire and made coffee, being obliged to breakfast on my biscuits and salt tongue, for the dainty lumps of pork I had cut yesterday had probably served a wolf for supper. While I was breakfasting, my faithful steed raised his head and rested it on my knee, that I might remove the bridle which I had left on during the night. I did so; hobbled him out in the grass, and then sat down again at my small fire, where I could see along the river and up the valley behind me, whose steep granite walls were just beginning to be illumined by the rising sun. In the valley itself the fog still lay like a white veil, and only a few tall trees raised their crowns above it. The stream by which I was sitting was all aglow with its tiger lilies, with which the dazzling white of my horse grazing among them formed a beautiful contrast. The mist in the valley was dissipated, and revealed the rich vegetation which grew there apart from the world. I remembered the fairy tales of childhood,--the enchanted Princes and sleeping Princesses, the Palace of Glass, and the Magic Valley,--and had they not been narrated before this continent was known to Europeans, I should have believed that the fables had their origin in this valley. I was very curious to learn whether there was another entrance besides the one I commanded; for if not, it was very possible that my hiding-place was unknown to the Indians, as the steep hills around did not reveal that they concealed such a fairylike kingdom in their interior. [Illustration: AFTER A DAY'S SPORT. _p. 81._]