"But I'm not a wild beast," he protested, inwardly. "I'm a man--with
human rights. By God, I'll never let them go!"
He wheeled round again, toward the lower lands and the lake. The lights
glowed more brightly as the darkness deepened, each lamp shining from some
little nest, where men and women were busied with the small tasks and
interests that made life. This was liberty! This was what he had a claim
upon! All his instincts were civilized, domestic. He would not go back to
the forest, to herd with wild nature, when he had a right to lie down
among his kind. He had slept in the open hundreds of times; but it had
been from choice. There had been pleasure then, in waking to the smell of
balsam and opening his eyes upon the stars. But to do the same thing from
compulsion, because men had closed up their ranks and ejected him from
their midst, was an outrage he would not accept. In the darkness his head
went up, while his eyes burned with a fire more intense than that of any
of the mild beacons from the towns below, as he strode back to the old
root-hedge and leaped it.
He felt the imprudence, not to say the uselessness, of the movement, as he
made it; and yet he kept on, finding himself in a field in which cows and
horses were startled from their munching by his footstep.
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