This business by the Shenandoah, this close fingering of peril and card-play between life and death, both parties being sharpers, ought properly to be absorbing and exciting. To attain distinctness, how could one be better elsewhere than in the valley of the Shenandoah, in an isolation so complete from all whom he met from day to day, hostile in purpose to them all, a single eddy against a wide current? Yet, when he looked within himself he seemed to see a space merely where forms flitted through and singing gusts of wind passed, but none found a home. The general at his work for a cause that was a doomed anachronism was something. Daddy Joe, in adoration of his hollow demi-god and shamming evangelist, was something. "Who or what am I? Is there any truth or any lie that from the bottom of me I believe, any goal I hope for, any man or woman I cling to?" One pictured the individual to be a kind of self-fed fire. One denied conventions of the mind and claimed his issue to be his own, his solitary pilgrimage from one eternity to another; he would look about him as he went and take note, neither lose himself nor cloud his eye nor cumber his feet, for the time would be short, and there would be much to see. Now, what he was doing and had done was nothing, for he did not care about it; and what he had felt and thought was little, only those flitting forms and gusts of wind that made a stir in their passage and left echoes behind them--some sandy sediment, perhaps--some changes in the mould or shell. If men, failing to find the infinite and the spirit outside of themselves--anywhere above or beneath or around--concluded it must be within, there lay the logic of their introspection. How, then, if in the centre of that "within" were found only an echoing space? At the touch of this discovery would not all structured dreams fall suddenly to dust and ashes, all illumined purposes lose their flush? "Be yourself," cried the latest seers, rising from the discouragement of faiths faded into myths, an ancient sun frightened from the eastern skies by their questioning. "Maintain your poise, look within, for there hides divinity in that holy of holies of a man of which his body is the temple. A pilgrim you are, from the darkness behind to the mystery before, and the universe is a road for your travelling soul." "Be myself! Who or what am I? The holy of holies appears empty, and no altar is there, either, nor self-fed fire." Was the universe so mad a joke as to be a road merely for the travelling of such bubbles, blown spherically with tainted air, colored with solar fantasies, apt to dissolve suddenly to a drop of soapy moisture in the dust by some such accident as was probable enough in the valley of the Shenandoah? The epochs in life, then, were not its physical events, but crises in thought, some sudden or gradual conviction or disillusioning. Gard felt now that this had come upon him gradually, beginning from the Peninsular campaign.