My arrangements were quickly and quietly made,--my equipments secretly completed. On pretense of visiting business acquaintances, I requested my wife to accompany me on a journey to St. Louis. With her usual passiveness, she consented. In a few days we were on our way. After our arrival, we made trips into the interior. Gradually, I diverged from civilization. Professing to find an unexpected charm in the novelty of this, I led the way still onward. We traveled on horseback,--often amid solitudes. I first astonished my wife by occasionally displaying on the game my precision with the rifle. (I had spent scores of hours at a shooting gallery in St. Louis.) I persuaded her to try a few shots. (I had provided a beautiful light rifle for her use.) Ambition to shoot well soon possessed her. By degrees, our open-air life gave her blood a bound which no secret grief could counteract. The excitement of the chase on our fleet horses, the incidents of our hunting adventures, and the novelty of our associations, created a glow of spirit which burst forth in unrestrained conversation, mirth, and song. Now, then, I began to display my literary acquisitions. During the long evenings in our tent, or the wigwam of an Indian, or the log cabin of a backwoods settler, we alternated in reading aloud from an excellent collection of books I had prepared. Reading introduced topics of conversation, in which I employed all that I had in memory, and all that had been created in myself by the electric collision of great authors. Never did a professional wit more ingeniously produce as sudden coruscations the _bon mots_ tediously studied; never did a philosophical conversationalist use to more advantage the wisdom conned over in the closet. I talked eloquently, profoundly. I rattled forth witticisms and poetical quotations. I amazed her. The man whom she thought incapable of any ideas beyond his ledger, and the stock market, and the cotton warehouse, was revealed as a person of taste and reading. Instead of appearing to her merely an indifferent person, to whom her fate had been chained, and whom she regarded in somewhat the same manner as Prometheus did his rock, I had become a pleasant companion,--a being of more vitality than she had perhaps ever met. Still, I had not excited the emotion of love. I did not expect it at this stage of the treatment, but I observed its absence with a pang. For woman's love is not a slowly extorted tribute to excellence, but a spontaneous bestowal. Unlike evil spirits, which, according to popular superstition, need urging over the threshold before they can enter and possess the hearthstone. Love leaps in unsolicited at any unguarded aperture, and becomes master of the household. Only genius could command her homage, and to this I could make no pretension.