Through the rainy season, Oman spent most of his time close to his father’s house. There was a place for him there, such as it was, where he was never molested. In the first weeks of his recovery, his over-worked mind found some delight in simple freedom from burdensome tasks. Idleness, silence, absence of rules and binding regulations, were sweet to him. He had the true Hindoo faculty for dreams, and would sit for hours lost in contemplation of unknowable and unfathomable things. Little objects—the bluish curl of smoke over a house-roof, the distant, flickering flame of sacrificial fires at dusk, a flight of heron toward the southern hills, the notes of the bulbul or the koïl—such things brought him infinite pleasure, and formed subjects for long contemplation. These were the periods when his mind was freest from its burden. But there were hours—days—weeks, when the world gave nothing to him; when melancholy held him for her own. At these times life seemed a burden too terrible for any mortal, and the continuance of such suffering as his, a thing beyond the endurance of spirits of the blessed. When the rains were over, and August came in, Oman began to spend much time wandering through the countryside, returning to the village only to eat and sleep:—sometimes not that. The country around Bul-Ruknu was broken, fertile, and unusually picturesque for India. To the east and southeast, at a distance of three or four miles, rose the northernmost hills of the Vindhya range, which extended thence, southward, to the Narmáda plain, fifty miles away. To the north and west were stretches of fertile fields, fringed with woods, and watered by a little stream fed by mountain brooks and springs, that went meandering through bottom-lands, and was used by farmers for purposes of irrigation. Very early in the course of his wanderings, Oman came upon this little river. During his childhood he had exhibited the curious trait of marked aversion to running water; but he found now that the old dread of it lingered only in a half-fascinating fear lest some day, out of very wantonness, he should plunge into the little stream and resistlessly let himself be overwhelmed in its lucent depths. This fascination did not diminish with time. He loved to explore its windings through the countryside, and follow it up a little way into its mountain fastnesses. In the hills, one day, he came upon a shadowy glade, turfed with kusa-grass and canopied with a giant banyan grove, a tree of a hundred trunks, that overspread two acres of ground. Here, in the green twilight, in a spot to which human beings never penetrated, Oman found his haven:—a haven of solitude where, for three or four years, he spent the greater part of his time.