The Mountain Girl by Emma Payne Erskine Chapter 4 Page 15

swirled about and thrown again upon the rocks, no longer animate, but a part of nature’s own, to return to his primal elements.

It was done, and Frale looked at his hands helplessly, feeling himself a second time a murderer. Yet he was in no way more to blame for the first than for this. As yet a boy untaught by life, he had not learned what to do with the forces within him. They rose up madly and mastered him. With a man’s power to love and hate, a man’s instincts, his untamed nature ready to assert itself for tenderness or cruelty, without a man’s knowledge of the necessity for self-control, where some of his kind would have been inert and listless, his inheritance had made him intense and fierce. Loving and gentle and kind he could be, yet when stirred by liquor, or anger, or fear, — most terrible.