and loosened his hold, and away he
went again over the grasses, and not one jot did he care if they were
_Poa_ or _Festuca_, or _Bromus_ or _Hordeum_, or any other name. Names
were nothing to him; all he had to do was to whirl his scarlet spots
about in the brilliant sun, rest when he liked, and go on again. I
wonder whether it is a joy to have bright scarlet spots, and to be
clad in the purple and gold of life; is the colour felt by the
creature that wears it? The rose, restful of a dewy morn before the
sunbeams have topped the garden wall, must feel a joy in its own
fragrance, and know the exquisite hue of its stained petals. The rose
sleeps in its beauty.

The fly whirls his scarlet-spotted wings about and splashes himself
with sunlight, like the children on the sands. He thinks not of the
grass and sun; he does not heed them at all--and that is why he is so
happy--any more than the barefoot children ask why the sea is there,
or why it does not quite dry up when it ebbs. He is unconscious; he
lives without thinking about living; and if the sunshine were a
hundred hours long, still it would not be long enough. No, never
enough of sun and sliding shadows that come like a hand over the table
to lovingly reach our shoulder, never enough of the grass that smells
sweet as a flower, not if we could live years and years equal in
number to the tides that have ebbed and flowed counting backwards four
years to every day and night, backward still till we found out which
came first, the night or the day. The scarlet-dotted fly knows nothing
of the names of the grasses that grow here where the sward nears the
sea, and thinking of him I have decided not to wilfully seek to learn
any more of their names either. My big grass book I have left at home,
and the dust is settling on the gold of the binding. I have picked a
handful this morning of which I know nothing. I will sit here on the
turf and the scarlet-dotted flies shall pass over me, as if I too were
but a grass. I will not think, I will be unconscious, I will live.

Listen! that was the low sound of a summer wavelet striking the
uncovered rock over there beneath in the green sea. All things that
are beautiful are found by chance, like everything that is good. Here
by me is a praying-rug, just wide enough to kneel on, of the richest
gold inwoven with crimson. All the Sultans of the East never had such
beauty as that to kneel on. It is, indeed, too beautiful to kneel on,
for th