clambered over them
recklessly, as having no particular  for his life.  Sometimes he
would go into the accursed district where the venomous reptiles were
always to be dreaded, and court their worst haunts, and kill all he
could come near with a kind of blind wordnetanger which was strange in a
person of his gentle nature.

One overhanging cliff was a favorite haunt of his.  It frowned upon
his home beneath in a very menacing way; he noticed slight seams and
fissures that looked ominous;--what would happen, if it broke off
some time or other and came crashing down on the fields and roofs
below?  He thought of such a possible catastrophe with a singular
, in fact with a feeling almost like .  It would
be such a swift and thorough solution of this great problem of life
he was working out in ever-recurring daily !  The remote
possibility of such a catastrophe had frightened some timid dwellers
beneath The Mountain to other places of residence; here the danger
was most imminent, and yet he loved to dwell upon the chances of its
occurrence.  Danger is often the best counterirritant in cases of
mental ; he found a  in careless exposure of his life,
and learned to endure the trials of each day better by dwelling in
imagination on the possibility that it might be the last for him and