Page:Stories after Nature.pdf/70

46 shewed a dumb sorrow by a thousand signs, that found a way to his breaking heart.

His way of life became wild, he loathed all intercourse as intrusive; and finding that he must follow the same means as hitherto to live, he loaded his camel, and went his way to the market.

Each step that he took, reminded him of his happy estate, the last time he had travelled that way; he thought of the many things that his dear wife had said in the places they had passed, of the songs she had sung, and the tears rolled from his eyes by night and by day; yet these musings were comfortable to him. He sold the skins, and returned, full of the soothing thoughts of the past, and agonizing certainty of the present reality.

Not having eaten or drunk that day, he stopped his camel; and looking for the skins containing the water (which he had filled as usual from the great spring), found that they had come unloosed and were gone. Parched with thirst, and thinking that he had dropped them many miles off, he knew not what to do; but sighing at such mean persecutions of fate, he mounted his camel and retraced his way, but they were nowhere to be found. As a whole skin of water would not have been enough to have carried him back to the spring, he be-