and on the fourth morning, late after the sunrise,
they lifted me and carried me forth upon their shoulders, a great white
cloth with fringes hanging over me; and then I heard the tramp of many
feet, and women crying, and the consoling tones of men, and I heard the
pipe of children in the distance, and the crackling of the snow beneath
the feet of the four men who bore me; and at last they laid me down upon
the stones and they pulled down the cloth from my face and then I heard
a voice speaking very low--the voice of Elsa, who had been my wife,
"Peace be to thee where thou art"; and I tried to turn from the cold
breath--for I could feel the cold as I could feel the warmth of that
breath--but I could not, for my flesh was dead but my spirit lived within
me. Then they carried me into some dank-smelling place; I knew they had
to stoop, for I could hear their shoulders scrump along the passage,
they laid me down on a shelf of stone and took the white thing quite
away, and then they left me, and then I heard a sound of labouring at
the door, and then a crash.

Slowly in the darkness I fell away, but the life that runs through the
body gathered itself away from the fallen parts, and when I was brown
and thin my self burnt strong, and then I heard a note of freedom in the
dark. It was like music, as my body went, and as my legs and arms became
slim sticks, and as the years made my hands and feet not like human
hands and feet, and as the inside of my body dried and fell; and one
spring and summer passed and my spirit grew ever nearer its birth, I
heard the soundless music breathing freedom night and day. At last my
brain grew hard as my heart had grown years before, and all the parts of
me decayed and shrivelled up until I was a brown, slim, wrinkled, hide
that held some bones: no more. At last a great storm shook the place one
night, and snow came in and wind and rain, and then my spirit was freed
at last; for, sagging from its place, a rock fell inwards where I lay,
and my brown bones were crushed and scattered.

Then I rose through the storm of the night, and I held to the tops of
the trees, and I dropped and the water drenched me as it rushed past
the banks of the streams, and I seized branches in the moonlight and
threw them aloft and had joy to see the wind carry them. Then I came to
myself again, and coming to the earth, tramped through the wood, to give
me customs as live mortals have; for I was alive, having been kille