Page:The clerk of the woods.djvu/99

Rh stick in his hand, and was brushing leaves and other litter out of the path. Perhaps he had married a model housekeeper in his youth, and had gone mad over the spring cleaning. He always saw me before I could get within easy speaking range; and he had the true woodman's knack of making himself suddenly invisible. Sometimes I was almost ready to believe that he had dropped into the ground. Evidently he did not mean to be talked with. Perhaps he feared that I should ask impertinent questions. More likely he thought me crazy. If not, why should I be wandering alone about the woods to no purpose? I had no path to keep in order.

And perhaps I am a little crazy. Medical men insist upon it that the milder forms of insanity are much more nearly universal than is commonly supposed. Perfectly sound minds, I understand them to intimate, are quite as rare as perfectly sound bodies. At that rate there cannot be more than two or three truly sane men in this small town; and the probabilities are that I am not one of them.