uer nature. I deceived myself, you will say, as I have often
myself said. I had and I had not. It is too long a question to
discuss here; but just then I felt that I had quitted the hot, tainted
atmosphere of the ballroom, that the morning air of heaven refreshed and
elevated me and was sweet to breathe. Friends and relations I had who
were dear to me; but I could forget them, even as I could forget the
splendid dreams which had been mine. And the woman I had loved, and
who perhaps loved me in return--I could forget her too. A daughter of
civilization and of that artificial life, she could never experience
such feelings as these and return to nature as I was doing. For women,
though within narrow limits more plastic than men, are yet without that
larger adaptiveness which can take us back to the sources of life, which
they have left eternally behind. Better, far better for both of us that
she should wait through the long, slow months, growing sick at heart
with hope deferred; that, seeing me no more, she should weep my loss,
and be healed at last by time, and find love and happiness again in the
old way, in the old place.

And while I thus sat thinking, sadly enough, but not despondingly, of
past and present and future, all at once on the warm, still air came
the resonant, far-reaching KLING-KLANG of the campanero from some leafy
summit half a league away. KLING-KLANG fell the sound again, and
often again, at intervals, affecting me strangely at that moment, so
bell-like, so like the great wide-travelling sounds associated in our
minds with Christian worship. And yet so unlike. A bell, yet not made of
gross metal dug out of earth, but of an ethereal, sublimer material
that floats impalpable and invisible in space--a vital bell suspended on
nothing, giving out sounds in harmony with the vastness of blue heaven,
the unsullied purity of nature, the glory of the sun, and conveying a
mystic, a higher message to the soul than the sounds that surge from
tower and belfry.

O mystic bell-bird of the heavenly race of the swallow and dove, the
quetzal and the nightingale! When the brutish savage and the brutish
white man that slay thee, one for food, the other for the benefit of
science, shall have passed away, live still, live to tell thy message to
the blameless spiritualized race that shall come after us to possess the
earth, not for a thousand years, but for ever; for how much shall thy
voice be our clarified successors when