toleration. They regarded his rebellion as but one more
proof of his general idiocy and inferiority, and after they had
whipped him they appointed him to do the simplest and heaviest work
they had for anyone to do, and he, seeing no other way of living,
did submissively what he was told.

He was ill for some days and they nursed him kindly. That
refined his submission. But they insisted on his lying in the
dark, and that was a great misery. And blind philosophers came and
talked to him of the wicked levity of his mind, and reproved him so
impressively for his doubts about the lid of rock that covered
their cosmic _casserole_ that he almost doubted whether indeed
he was not the victim of hallucination in not seeing it overhead.

So Nunez became a citizen of the Country of the Blind, and
these people ceased to be a generalised people and became
individualities to him, and familiar to him, while the world beyond
the mountains became more and more remote and unreal. There was
Yacob, his master, a kindly man when not annoyed; there was Pedro,
Yacob's nephew; and there was Medina-sarote, who was the youngest
daughter of Yacob. She was little esteemed in the world of the
blind, because she had a clear-cut face and lacked that satisfying,
glossy smoothness that is the blind man's ideal of feminine beauty,
but Nunez thought her beautiful at first, and presently the most
beautiful thing in the whole creation. Her closed eyelids were
not sunken and red after the common way of the valley, but lay as
though they might open again at any moment; and she had long
eyelashes, which were considered a grave disfigurement. And her
voice was weak and did not satisfy the acute hearing of the valley
swains. So that she had no lover.

There came a time when Nunez thought that, could he win her,
he would be resigned to live in the valley for all the rest of his
days.

He watched her; he sought opportunities of doing her little
services and presently he found that she observed him. Once at a
rest-day gathering they sat side by side in the dim starlight, and
the music was sweet. His hand came upon hers and he dared to clasp
it. Then very tenderly she returned his pressure. And one day, as
they were at their meal in the darkness, he felt her hand very
softly seeking him, and as it chanced the fire leapt then, and he
saw the tenderness of her face.

He sought to speak to her.

He went to her one day when she was sitting in the