Along the ridge, a broad walk leads to the spot where the wounded-to-death body of the unhappy girl was found. But, if you think otherwise, in your humor of unsettled choice, you can turn to your right, and, winding around the base of the hill, through dwarf pines at first, and heavy timber afterward, stroll on until you reach the scene of the primal tragedy. Did they go by this way? The wildness, the solemnity, and total seclusion of the place, even in the broad daylight, are oppressive to the imagination, if you happen to be alone. Company in a graveyard, at midnight, destroys in some measure the unpleasant sense of other than human propinquity; and it is the same in a modified form, in this umbrageous condensity. By all but hilarious picnic parties, the solitude and seriousness of a wood is admitted; and this wood is one of the most unique I have ever visited. But, since then, it is no simple congregation of trees and rocks and mysterious paths,—no longer a sylvan asylum of perfect repose, inviting to reverie, to pleasure, or the interviews of love, sweetened by the security that shadows of leaves throw upon the blushing hieroglyphic of the cheek, or the deeper and softer and better understood language of the eyes. A gloom is here established forever. It is a witness of that most terrible of tragedies to which our human condition is liable. The knife of the murderer has gleamed here,—the cry of the victim been uttered. It is haunted! Haunted by what? Who can tell? By ghosts, or the idea of ghosts? It makes no difference which. In such cases, where logic is shattered over a catastrophe, imagination lifts up the fallen form of contracted reason, and ministers to its inability. Man does not always demand facts; or, rather, in the solving of the many difficult problems that are suggested by special and eccentric occurrences, he does not demand an iron-clad testimony,—a testimony not in accordance with the fact under inquisition. The existence of a thing is to be proved by evidence that can apply to the nature of its existence. The intention of Byron’s brain cannot be proved by the same process you would take to prove that the ocean over the Banks of Newfoundland is not so deep as in its centre. If we waited for facts in proof of what we cannot directly understand, we should starve mentally, or go mad. Air is invisible, but it exists. It is here; it is yonder. It is more keenly felt by animals whose skins are thin. The armadilla, possibly, doubts its existence, unless he has the gift of seeing it; but the hairless dog of China is no sceptic on the subject of atmospheric changes and attacks. Man, exposed to the blast, feels it more sensibly than the elephant placed in the same current. The _opinion_ of the armadilla, or of the elephant, has nothing to do with the fact of the air’s existence. The former animal recognizes a tempest, not by what he feels, but what he sees; and if he sees wind, then I give up my illustration, but not my argument.