some unknown
precious stone, of the size of a large orange and whiter than milk, and
yet, in spite of its opacity, with a crystalline lustre on the surface.
Next day I went again, scarcely hoping to find it still unwithered; it
was fresh as if only just opened; and after that I went often, sometimes
at intervals of several days, and still no faintest sign of any change,
the clear, exquisite lines still undimmed, the purity and lustre as
I had first seen it. Why, I often asked, does not this mystic forest
flower fade and perish like others? That first impression of its
artificial appearance had soon left me; it was, indeed, a flower, and,
like other flowers, had life and growth, only with that transcendent
beauty it had a different kind of life. Unconscious, but higher; perhaps
immortal. Thus it would continue to bloom when I had looked my last
on it; wind and rain and sunlight would never stain, never tinge, its
sacred purity; the savage Indian, though he sees little to admire in a
flower, yet seeing this one would veil his face and turn back; even
the browsing beast crashing his way through the forest, struck with
its strange glory, would swerve aside and pass on without harming it.
Afterwards I heard from some Indians to whom I described it that
the flower I had discovered was called Hata; also that they had a
superstition concerning it--a strange belief. They said that only one
Hata flower existed in the world; that it bloomed in one spot for the
space of a moon; that on the disappearance of the moon in the sky the
Hata disappeared from its place, only to reappear blooming in some
other spot, sometimes in some distant forest. And they also said that
whosoever discovered the Hata flower in the forest would overcome all
his enemies and obtain all his desires, and finally outlive other men
by many years. But, as I have said, all this I heard afterwards, and my
half-superstitious feeling for the flower had grown up independently
in my own mind. A feeling like that was in me while I gazed on the face
that had no motion, no consciousness in it, and yet had life, a life of
so high a kind as to match with its pure, surpassing loveliness. I could
almost believe that, like the forest flower, in this state and aspect it
would endure for ever; endure and perhaps give of its own immortality to
everything around it--to me, holding her in my arms and gazing fixedly
on the pale face framed in its cloud of dark, silken hair; to the
le