s
fair hair bleached by the sun, would bring the water. He was the hero of
my boyhood, and part of him indeed was in me. And I would have followed
him again to Vincennes despite the tortures of the damned. But when I
spoke his name he grew stouter before me, and his eyes lost their lustre
and his hair turned gray; and his hand shook as he held out the gourd and
spilled its contents ere I could reach them.

Sometimes another brought the water, and at sight of her I would tremble
and grow faint, and I had not the strength to reach for it. She would
look at me with eyes that laughed despite the resolution of the mouth.
Then the eyes would grow pitiful at my helplessness, and she would murmur
my name. There was some reason which I never fathomed why she could not
give me the water, and her own suffering seemed greater than mine because
of it. So great did it seem that I forgot my own and sought to comfort
her. Then she would go away, very slowly, and I would hear her calling
to me in the wind, from the stars to which I looked up from the prairie.
It was she, I thought, who ordered the world. Who, when women were lost
and men cried out in distress, came to them calmly, ministered to them
deftly.

Once--perhaps a score of times, I cannot tell--was limned on the ceiling,
where the cracks were, her miniature, and I knew what was coming and
shuddered and cried aloud because I could not stop it. I saw the narrow
street of a strange city deep down between high houses,--houses with
gratings on the lowest windows, with studded, evil-looking doors, with
upper stories that toppled over to shut out the light of the sky, with
slated roofs that slanted and twisted this way and that and dormers
peeping from them. Down in the street, instead of the King's white
soldiers, was a foul, unkempt rabble, creeping out of its damp places,
jesting, cursing, singing. And in the midst of the rabble a lady sat in
a cart high above it unmoved. She was the lady of the miniature. A
window in one of the jutting houses was flung open, a little man leaned
out excitedly, and I knew him too. He was Jean Baptiste Lenoir, and he
cried out in a shrill voice:--

"You must take off her ruff, citizens. You must take off her ruff!"

There came a blessed day when my thirst was gone, when I looked up at the
cracks in the ceiling and wondered why they did not change into horrors.
I watched them a long, long time, and it seemed incredible that they
should still rema