mmoth, as I saw it, had a huge hump--like the steam-chest of an
enormous engine--over its shoulders."

"And where did you see it, and when?"

"You are curious to know?"

"Yes, I think I am; and there is a quiet of expectancy abroad. I hear the
ghost of my dead brother walking in the corridor, Dinah; and we are all
waiting for you to speak."

She smiled, and said, "Push me over the cigarettes."

She struck a match, kindled the little crackling tube, and threw the
light out into the shrubbery. It traced a tiny arc of flame and vanished.
The sky was full of the mewing of lost kittens, it seemed. The sound came
from innumerable peewits, that fled and circled above the slopes of the
darkening meadows below.

"What an uncomfortable seer you are!" she said, "to people this dear
human night with your fancies. No doubt, now, you will read between
the lines of that bird speech down there?" (She looked at me curiously,
but with none of the mournful speculativeness of a soul struggling
against the dimness of its own vision.) "To me it is articulate
happiness--nothing more abstruse. Yes, I have seen a mastodon; and I was
as glad to happen on the beast as a naturalist is glad to find a missing
link in a chain of evidence. From the moment, I knew myself quite clearly
to be the recovered heir to this abused planet."

She paused a moment, and contracted her brows, as if regretfully and in
anger. "If I had only seen it sooner!" she cried, low; "before I had, in
my pride of strength, tested the poison that has bewildered the brains of
my sisters!"

Her general reserve was her self-armour against the bolts of the
Philistines. What worldling would not have read mania in much that was
spoken by this sane woman? Yet, indeed, if we were all to find the power
to give expression to our inmost thoughts, madness and sanity would have
to change places in the order of affairs.

"Once," said Dinah--"and it was when I was a young woman--a man in whom I
was interested shipped as passenger on a whaling vessel. This friend was
what is called a degenerate. Physically and morally he had yielded his
claim to any share in that province of the sun, that his race had
conquered and annexed only to find it antipathetic to its needs.
Combative effort was grown impossible to him, as in time it will grow to
you all. You drop from the world like dead flies from a wall. He could
not physic his soul with woods, and groves, and waters. To his
perceptions, li