He staggered, but the desk behind caught him. Straightening himself up, and grappling the panther with all his strength as he would a man, he turned with it and bent it over the sharp edge of the ponderous desk, lower, lower, trying to break its back. One of the fore feet was beginning to tear through his clothing, and straightening himself up again, he reached down and caught this foot and tried to bend it, break it. He threw himself with all his force upon the floor, falling with the cougar under him, trying to crush it. He staggered to his feet again, but stepped on his own blood and fell. And then, feeling his blood trickling down his breast and his strength going, with one last effort he put up his hands and seizing the throat, fastened his fingers like iron rivets around the windpipe. And then--with the long, loud, hoarse, despairing roar with which a man, his mouth half full of water, sinks far out in the ocean--he fell again. XI IT was ten o'clock that morning of mid-May. The rain was over. Clouds and mists were gone, leaving an atmosphere of purest crystal. The sun floated a globe of gold in the yielding blue. Above the wilderness on a dead treetop, the perch of an eagle now flashing like a yellow weather-vane, a thrush poured the spray-like far-falling fountain of his notes over upon the bowed woods. Beneath him the dull green domes of the trees flashed as though inlaid with gems, white and rose. Under these domes the wild grapevines, climbing the forest arches as the oak of stone climbs the arches of a cathedral, filled the ceiling and all the shadowy spaces between with fresh outbursts of their voluptuous dew-born fragrance. And around the rough-haired Satyr feet of these vines the wild hyacinth, too full of its own honey to stand, fell back on its couch of moss waiting to be visited by the singing bee. The whole woods emerged from the cloudy bath of Nature with the coolness, the freshness, the immortal purity of Diana united to the roseate glow and mortal tenderness of Venus; and haunted by two spirits: the chaste, unfading youth of Endymion and the dust-born warmth and eagerness of Dionysus. Through these woods, feeling neither their heat nor their cold, secured by Nature against any passion for either the cooling star or the inflaming dust, rode Amy--slowly homeward from the ball. Yet lovelier, happier than anything the forest held. She had pushed her bonnet entirely off so that it hung by the strings at the back of her neck; and her face emerged from the round sheath of it like a pink and white tulip, newly risen and bursting forth. When she reached home, she turned the old horse loose with many pattings and good-byes and promises of maple sugar later in the day; and then she bounded away to the garden to her aunt, of whom, perhaps, she was more truly fond than of any one in the world except herself.