| OCR Text |
Show 2. youngest brother, Daniel. "In case anything should befall me," he began, as he settled his affairs in careful and detailed completeness. To Daniel he must have sounded melancholy and deeply disturbed. So when the letter concluded, "I hope you will not infer from all this that I am going into great danger," the family might have had good reason to be troubled by brother John's state of mind. A journal from this excursion has been published, but one is struck by important differences between the hand-written notebook, and A Thousand Mile Walk to the Gulf, edited by W.F. Bade. Although the notebook Bade used is probably not the original, since Muir recopied most of his original journals, and since the introduction is clearly written in the language which he learned in Yosemite - nevertheless one is surprised by the contents of this hand-written document. For one thing, it was written in the past tense, unlike most of Muir's journals, suggesting that he was constantly looking forward. The days were not organized by the calendar, but were simply numbered consecutively; the numbers ran into the fifties, and then ceased altogether sometime around the time Muir became ill toward the end of October. These structural features suggest that Muir was entering a new life, not to be measured by the old standards of calendars or watches, but lived one day at a time, and then left behind. A third feature is the style of his drawings. They are undoubtedly original and are pasted into the notebook. Many include, carefully and prominently, portraits of Muir himself as a part of the scene; indeed this |
