farm in the plain. In
the backyard, children were playing; a man was sharpening a plowshare
at a wheel, and out of the kitchen-shed there came a clatter of dishes
and the voice of a woman in song. Seized by a sudden perverse humor,
Charles-Norton swooped into the chicken-yard and snatched a hen which,
feeling herself rising in his hand, straightway shut her eyes and died
of imagination. A scream rose from the earth, and looking down,
Charles-Norton saw the three little children, legs apart, hands behind
them, gazing up with white eyes; the man, back to the wheel, had his
mouth open, as if inviting his vanishing fowl to drop back into it; and
out of the kitchen door a wide woman suddenly popped, her lips working
in malediction. His amusement a bit dampened by this consternation and
by the unforeseen conduct of the hen, Charles-Norton went winging back,
the dead fowl dangling at the end of his arm, to his retreat, and that
night, when the pangs of his conscience had somewhat moderated, enjoyed
the best dinner he had had for many days.

This incident reawakened in Charles-Norton a certain interest in
human-kind. He began to visit the Valley more often.

The Valley was some hundred miles south of his meadow. It was a great
cleft that split the mountain range from crest to center. Its walls were
perpendicular and glacier-polished, and sculptured at the top into smooth
domes and fretted spires. Down these sheer walls, here and there, coming
to them without suspicion, whole rivers fell--some in rockets of
diamonds, others chastely, in thin flight, like shifting and impalpable
veils, others in great lustrous columns that struck the rocky bottom with
thunderous impact and rebounded high in clouds of pulverized silver.

The Valley seemed full of people. They came in from the West, in stages.
They lived in a large structure, at the bottom, which Charles-Norton
surmised to be a hotel, and hundreds camped along the banks of the river,
which wound light-green through the dark-green meadows. They wandered
about incessantly, like ants; most of the time, at the bottom, but a good
deal of the time also along the vertical sides, toiling pantingly up
narrow trails, laid like the coils of a riata, till they reached points
of vantage--domes, pinnacles, heads of falls--whereupon they immediately
sat down and devoured sandwiches.

When Charles-Norton had first discovered the Valley, he had fled from it
at the sight of human beings. But now