ldren is better worth having than the
Cross of the Legion of Honour. They are the only critics from whom praise
is not to be bought. As animals are said to see spirits, children have, I
think, an eye for souls. It is so easy to have an eye for beautiful
surfaces. Such eyes are common enough. An eye for beautiful souls is
rarer; and, unless you possess that eye for souls, you waste your time on
White Soul. She has, of course, her external attractions, dainty features,
refined contours; but these it would not be difficult to match in any
morning's walk. It is when she smiles that her face, it seems to me, is
one of the most wonderful in the world. Till she smiles, it is like the
score of some great composer's song before the musician releases it
warbling for joy along the trembling keys; it is like the statue of Memnon
before the dawn steals to kiss it across the desert. White Soul's face
when she smiles is made, you would say, of larks and dew, of nightingales
and stars.

She is an eldritch little creature, a little frightening to live
with--with her gold flaxen hair that seems to grow blonder as it nears her
head: burnt blonde, it would seem, with the white light of the spirit that
pours all day long from her brows. There is something, as we say, almost
supernatural about her--'a fairy's child.' The gypsies have a share in her
blood, she boasts in her naive way, and with her love for all that is free
and lawless and under-the-sky--but I always say the fairies have more. She
is constantly saying 'Hush!' and 'Whisht!' when no one else can hear a
sound, and she dreams the quaintest of dreams.

Once she woke sobbing in the night and told her husband, who knew her ways
and loved her tenfold for them, that she had dreamed herself in the old
churchyard, and that as the moon rose behind the tower the three old men
who live in the three yew-trees had come out and played cards upon a tomb
in the moonlight, and one of them had beckoned to her and offered to tell
her fortune. It fell out that she was to die in the spring, and as he held
up the fatal card, the old man had leered at her--and then a cock crew,
all three vanished, and she awoke.

Her dreams are nearly all about dying, and, though she is obviously
robust, there is that transparent ethereal look in her face which makes
old women say 'she is not long for this world,' that fateful beauty which
creates an atmosphere of doom about it. You cannot look at her without a
queer