o me and peeped up into my face.

"'Nice curls, pretty curls,' she said; 'I like curls.'

"She felt my hair all over, with her little hands. When I put out my arm
she let me take her and sit her on my knee. She kissed me with her soft
mouth. We were happy till the nurse-girl came and shook her, and asked
her if she was not ashamed to sit on the knee of that strange man. But I
do not think my little one minded. She laughed at me as she went out.

"If the world was all children I could like it; but men and women draw
me so strangely, and then press me away, till I am in agony. I was not
meant to live among people. Perhaps some day, when I am grown older, I
will be able to go and live among them and look at them as I look at the
rocks, and bushes, without letting them disturb me, and take myself from
me; but not now. So I grew miserable; a kind of fever seemed to eat me;
I could not rest, or read, or think; so I came back here. I knew you
were not here but it seemed as though I should be nearer you; and it is
you I want--you that the other people suggest to me, but cannot give."

He had filled all the sheets he had taken, and now lifted down the
last from the mantelpiece. Em had dropped asleep, and lay slumbering
peacefully on the skin before the fire. Out of doors the storm still
raged; but in a fitful manner, as though growing half weary of itself.
He bent over his paper again, with eager flushed cheek, and wrote on.

"It has been a delightful journey, this journey home. I have walked on
foot. The evening before last, when it was just sunset, I was a little
footsore and thirsty, and went out of the road to look for water. I went
down into a deep little kloof. Some trees ran along the bottom, and I
thought I should find water there. The sun had quite set when I got to
the bottom of it. It was very still--not a leaf was stirring anywhere.
In the bed of the mountain torrent I thought I might find water. I came
to the bank, and leaped down into the dry bed. The floor on which I
stood was of fine white sand, and the banks rose on every side like the
walls of a room.

"Above there was a precipice of rocks, and a tiny stream of water oozed
from them and fell slowly on to the flat stone below. Each drop you
could hear fall like a little silver bell. There was one among the trees
on the bank that stood cut out against the white sky. All the other
trees were silent; but this one shook and trembled against the sky.
Everything