Something was making him nibble at the edge of stale ideas as if his sturdy physical egotism no longer nourished his peremptory heart.

The things that I loved were very frail. Very fragile. I didn't know that. I thought they were indestructible. They weren't.

It must be very fragile, if a handful of berries can bring it down.

I should be rather like the wild hawk, who, barred the free exercise of his soar through heaven, will dash himself to pieces against the bars of his cage.

When he wanted, he could radiate charm and sincerity, but I often wonder in these later days if anything about him was as it seemed. I think now he was a man fighting constantly to escape the bars of an invisible cage.

He forgot his wounds, his hunger and thirst, and became fear; hopeless fear

His ribs were as visible as hands around a cup.

You drew a bird that was here, a kind of sweet chanticleer. But with a terrible fear that the cage couldn't tame

I hate a cramp, he thought. It is a treachery of one's own body.

His fingers twined nervously about his rifle. He wished that it was an engine of annihilating power. He felt that he and his companions were being taunted and derided from sincere convictions that they were poor and puny. His knowledge of his inability to take vengeance for it made his rage into a dark and stormy specter, that possessed him and made him dream of abominable cruelties. The tormentors were flies sucking insolently at his blood, and he thought that he would have given his life for a revenge of seeing their faces in pitiful plights.

My heart's broken,' he thought. 'If I feel this way my heart must be broken.

It marked, further, the decay or going to pieces of his moral nature, a vain thing and a handicap in the ruthless struggle for existence.

When I was a fairly precocious young man I became thoroughly impressed with the futility of the hopes and strivings that chase most men restlessly through life. Moreover, I soon discovered the cruelty of that chase, which in those years was much more carefully covered up by hypocrisy and glittering words than is the case today. By the mere existence of his stomach everyone was condemned to participate in that chase. The stomach might well be satisfied by such participation, but not man insofar as he is a thinking and feeling being.

Confounded, though immortal. But his doom, reserved him to more wrath; for now the thought both of lost happiness and lasting pain torments him.