l days past that
he might gratify mine. I was standing on a rock, high and dry and grey
with lichen; he was poking about in some swampy ground.

"Are you tired, Daisy?" he said, looking up.

"My feet are tired," I said.

"That is all of you that can be tired. Sit down where you are--I will
come to you directly."

So I sat down and watched him, and looked off between whiles to the
wonderful green walls of the glen. The summer blue was very clear
overhead; the stillness of the place very deep; insects, birds, a
flutter of leaves, and the grating of Dr. Sandford's boot upon a
stone, all the sounds that could be heard.

"Why you are warm, as well as tired, Daisy," he said, coming up to my
rock at last.

"It _is_ warm," I answered.

"Warm?" said he. "Look here, Daisy!"

"Well, what in the world is that?" I said, laughing. "A little mud or
earth is all that I can see."

"Ah, your eyes are not good for much, Daisy--except to look at."

"Not good for much for _that_," I said, amused; for his eyes were bent
upon the earth in his hand.

"I don't know," said he, getting up on the rock beside me and sitting
down. "I used to find strange things in them once. But this is
something you will like, Daisy."

"Is it?"

"If you like wonderful things as well as ever."

"Oh, I do!" I said. "What is it, Dr. Sandford?"

He carefully wrapped up his treasure in a bit of paper and put it in
his pocket; then he cut down a small hickory branch and began to fan
me with it; and while he sat there fanning me he entered upon a
lecture such as I had never listened to in my life. I had studied a
little geology of course, as well as a little of everything else; but
no lesson like this had come in the course of my experience. Taking
his text from the very wild glen where we were sitting and the
mountain sides upon which I had been gazing, Dr. Sandford spread a
clear page of nature before me and interpreted it. He answered
unspoken questions; he filled great vacancies of my ignorance; into
what had been abysms of thought he poured a whole treasury of
intelligence and brought floods of light. All so quietly, so
luminously, with such a wealth of knowledge and facility of giving it,
that it is a simple thing to say no story of Eastern magic was ever
given into more charmed ears around an Arabian desert fire. I listened
and he talked and fanned me. He talked like one occupied with his
subject and not with me: but he met every half-uttered d