er, and sitting
himself comfortably in a hollow of it, extends the pole, and drops into
the crystalline waters at his feet a bit of red flannel. Immediately
there is a small convulsion and he whisks out of the lake a vibrant
little object that looks like a fragment of rainbow. He whisks out
another, another--twelve in succession. He goes back to the fire with his
rainbows.

There, he--fries them; and--eats them.

Upon which he squats contentedly upon the grass, and fills and lights his
pipe. He sits there very quietly, his feet drawn up, his wings behind him
like a resplendent mantle; he smokes gravely his little black pipe. His
eyes are half-closed, watching the hazy blue puffs of the bowl rise
toward the turquoise-blue dome of the sky. Far above him, a hawk is
circling; to the sight, after a while, a vague melancholy enters his
heart, a subtle and inexplicable yearning. He rises slowly to it, his
pipe dropping from his loosened lips. He tucks the pipe into his trunks
(that is why he wears the trunks); his wings spread out to both sides. He
gives a little spring--and is up in the air.

He hovers above the meadow a while, a bit aimlessly, as though waiting
for an inspiration, rising, falling, rising with slow strong flap of
wing--then suddenly he is off, like a streak, in a whirring diagonal for
the high crests. He dwindles, higher and higher, farther and farther,
smaller and smaller, till finally he is among the tip-top pinnacles, a
mere white palpitation, a snow-flake in the whirl of a capricious wind,
a little glistening moth flitting from glacier to glacier as from lily to
lily.

Down in the deserted meadow, the little donkey opens his mouth
creakingly, and throws forth a lonesome bray.

CHAPTER X

This is what Charles-Norton Sims is doing while his little wife, back in
New York, sits desolate in her empty flat.

On the fourth day of his flight, sitting at the wide window of a Pullman
which was clicking slowly along a high summit, he had caught between two
snow-sheds a rapid glimpse of this nook in the chaos of the World. In a
picture flashed clear for a moment to his eyes, he had seen the cabin,
the meadow, and the lake; and his heart had given a leap like that of the
anchor of a ship which at last has come to port. When, thirty minutes
later, the train, now on the down-grade, had slid with set brakes by a
little mining-camp huddled at the foot of a great red scar torn in the
heart of a slanting pi