It had seemed so often to Mount Dunstan--oftener than not. Youth
should not know such awakening, he was well aware; but he had known it
sometimes even when he had been a child, and since his return from his
ill-starred struggle in America, the dull and reluctant facing of the
day had become a habit. Yet on the morning after his talk with his
friend--the curious, uplifted, unpractical talk which had seemed to
hypnotise him--he knew when he opened his eyes to the light that he had
awakened as a man should awake--with an unreasoning sense of pleasure
in the life and health of his own body, as he stretched mighty limbs,
strong after the night's rest, and feeling that there was work to be
done. It was all unreasoning--there was no more to be done than on those
other days which he had wakened to with bitterness, because they seemed
useless and empty of any worth--but this morning the mere light of the
sun was of use, the rustle of the small breeze in the leaves, the
soft floating past of the white clouds, the mere fact that the great
blind-faced, stately house was his own, that he could tramp far over
lands which were his heritage, unfed though they might be, and that the
very rustics who would pass him in the lanes were, so to speak, his own
people: that he had name, life, even the common thing of hunger for his
morning food--it was all of use.
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