eBooks Base 2000

Morning was waiting outside in all
its brilliant, youthful coloring, but only entered as the matured and
sobered day.
Seen in that stronger light, the monstrous tree near which the dead
bear lay revealed its age in its denuded and scarred trunk, and showed
in its base a deep cavity, a foot or two from the ground, partly hidden
by hanging strips of bark which had fallen across it. Suddenly one of
these strips was pushed aside, and a young man leaped lightly down.
But for the rifle he carried and some modern peculiarities of dress, he
was of a grace so unusual and unconventional that he might have passed
for a faun who was quitting his ancestral home. He stepped to the side
of the bear with a light elastic movement that was as unlike customary
progression as his face and figure were unlike the ordinary types of
humanity. Even as he leaned upon his rifle, looking down at the
prostrate animal, he unconsciously fell into an attitude that in any
other mortal would have been a pose, but with him was the picturesque
and unstudied relaxation of perfect symmetry.


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