The weather was very bright and clear and the views very fine.

At each hilltop I checked my mount, wheeled him and remained so for sometime, contemplating the magnificence I might never see again, the glory upon which my gaze, most likely, would never again feast.

I should have felt my eyes fill with tears at each of these prospects, the viewing of which was, each time, in the nature of a last farewell.

Yet, somehow, most irrationally, I felt anything but dejected, rather hopeful and full of conjectures about my future, instead of being filled with forebodings of doom, with sorrow for my hard fate..