e earth from whence the waters come. When all the world outside lay
dead and bare, Hidden Water flowed more freely, and its garden lived
on untouched.

Never had Hardy seen it more peaceful, and as he climbed the
Indian steps and stood beneath the elder, where _Chupa Rosa_ had
built her tiny nest his heart leapt suddenly as he remembered Lucy.
Here they had sat together in the first gladness of her coming,
reading his forgotten verse and watching the eagle's flight; only for
that one time, and then the fight with the sheep had separated them.
He reached up and plucked a spray of elder blossoms to send her for a
keep-sake--and then like a blow he remembered the forget-me-not! From
that same garden he had fetched her a forget-me-not for repentance,
and then forgotten her for Kitty. Who but Lucy could have left the
little book of poems, or treasured a flower so long to give it back
at parting? And yet in his madness he had forgotten her!

He searched wistfully among the rocks for another forget-me-not, but
the hot breath of the drought had killed them. As he climbed slowly
down the stone steps he mused upon some poem to take the place of the
flowers that were dead, but the spirit of the drought was everywhere.
The very rocks themselves, burnt black by centuries of sun, were
painted with Indian prayers for rain. A thousand times he had seen the
sign, hammered into the blasted rocks--the helix, that mystic symbol
of the ancients, a circle, ever widening, never ending,--and wondered
at the fate of the vanished people who had prayed to the Sun for
rain.

The fragments of their sacrificial _ollas_ lay strewn among the
bowlders, but the worshippers were dead; and now a stranger prayed to
his own God for rain. As he sat at his desk that night writing to Lucy
about the drought, the memory of those Indian signs came upon him
suddenly and, seizing a fresh sheet of paper, he began to write. At
the second stanza he paused, planned out his rhymes and hurried on
again, but just as his poem seemed finished, he halted at the last
line. Wrestle as he would he could not finish it--the rhymes were
against him--it would not come right. Ah, that is what sets the artist
apart from all the under-world of dreamers--his genius endures to the
end; but the near-poet struggles like a bee limed in his own honey.
What a confession of failure it was to send away--a poem unfinished,
or finished wrong! And yet--the unfinished poem was like him. How
of