are
descended from those who, many years ago, were men and women just as you
are. They are not all-powerful. I myself mean to escape from them.
Generations of slavery have crushed your spirit, but in the country from
which I come there are no slaves. I shall escape and I shall take you
with me."

"You are good. I will do as you say. But how can one escape?"

"In the town on the shore I hope to be able to find a boat."

She looked at me with her dark and lustrous eyes wide open in sheer
wonderment.

"What is a boat?" she asked.

Her ignorance I found was not assumed. The making of a boat had been
prohibited so long by the beings of the first class that now even the
recollection of it had passed from the workers. They regarded the sea
with terror. It was the grey liquid wall of their prison-house. To touch
it was to die. They bathed in the forest pools, and never in the sea.
The fish that they ate were fresh-water fish only. Their masters had
told them numberless strange lies about the sea.

"Dream," I said, "there is one thing which I cannot understand. You live
in daily terror of these people whom you miscall gods. You are fairly
well treated, but you are not free. You live as slaves. Why do you tell
me, then, that you want every hour and every minute of life?"

She dipped a bare foot in the water below her, passing it slowly to and
fro.

"There is always love," she said pensively.

CHAPTER VIII

"What do you know of love?" I asked.

She shrugged her pretty shoulders. "Almost nothing, except of the lesser
loves--the love of children, the squirrels in the forest."

"Of parents," I suggested.

"No," said Dream decisively. "You cannot love those whom you do not
know."

"But how does it happen that you do not know your parents?"

"How should I? Sometimes for two years, sometimes for three--as the gods
decide--the child remains with its parents. After that it is taken away
from its parents and brought up by the gods. That is the law."

"But these women who have their children taken away from them--how do
they bear it?"

"Sometimes they are so sad that they go away into the forest and eat the
nightshade and die. More often they weep for a long time and then they
forget. When a thing is the law and it cannot be altered, there are very
few who become angry or grieved about it. What would be the use? The
gods are very careful about the children, you know."

"In what way careful?"

"If a child is