s call me. I create.
Yes, that is the word ... but I need daylight. I give life to the cold
marble, I melt sonorous bronze in fire, in bright hot fire.... Why didst
thou touch me with thy hand?"

"Come"--said Lazarus--"Thou art my guest."

And they went to the house. And a long night enveloped the earth.

The slave, seeing that his master did not come, went to seek him, when
the sun was already high in the sky. And he beheld his master side by
side with Lazarus: in profound silence were they sitting right under the
dazzling and scorching sunrays and looking upward. The slave began to
weep and cried out:

"My master, what has befallen thee, master?"

The very same day the sculptor left for Rome. On the way Aurelius was
pensive and taciturn, staring attentively at everything--the men, the
ship, the sea, as though trying to retain something. On the high sea a
storm burst upon them, and all through it Aurelius stayed on the deck
and eagerly scanned the seas looming near and sinking with a thud.

At home his friends were frightened at the change which had taken place
in Aurelius, but he calmed them, saying meaningly:

"I have found it."

And without changing the dusty clothes he wore on his journey, he fell
to work, and the marble obediently resounded under his sonorous hammer.
Long and eagerly worked he, admitting no one, until one morning he
announced that the work was ready and ordered his friends to be
summoned, severe critics and connoisseurs of art. And to meet them he
put on bright and gorgeous garments, that glittered with yellow
gold--and--scarlet byssus.

"Here is my work," said he thoughtfully.

His friends glanced and a shadow of profound sorrow covered their faces.
It was something monstrous, deprived of all the lines and shapes
familiar to the eye, but not without a hint at some new, strange image.

On a thin, crooked twig, or rather on an ugly likeness of a twig rested
askew a blind, ugly, shapeless, outspread mass of something utterly and
inconceivably distorted, a mad leap of wild and bizarre fragments, all
feebly and vainly striving to part from one another. And, as if by
chance, beneath one of the wildly-rent salients a butterfly was chiseled
with divine skill, all airy loveliness, delicacy, and beauty, with
transparent wings, which seemed to tremble with an impotent desire to
take flight.

"Wherefore this wonderful butterfly, Aurelius?" said somebody
falteringly.

"I know not"--was the sc