out in long lovely file, one after the other, each taking its leave of
her as it passed! It must be so: here were more and more sweet sounds,
following and fading! The whole of the _Out_ was going out again; it was
all going after the great lovely lamp! She would be left the only
creature in the solitary day! Was there nobody to hang up a new lamp for
the old one, and keep the creatures from going?--She crept back to her
rock very sad. She tried to comfort herself by saying that anyhow there
would be room out there; but as she said it she shuddered at the thought
of _empty_ room.

When next she succeeded in getting out, a half-moon hung in the east: a
new lamp had come, she thought, and all would be well.

It would be endless to describe the phases of feeling through which
Nycteris passed, more numerous and delicate than those of a thousand
changing moons. A fresh bliss bloomed in her soul with every varying
aspect of infinite nature. Ere long she began to suspect that the new
moon was the old moon, gone out and come in again, like herself; also
that, unlike herself, it wasted and grew again; that it was indeed a
live thing, subject like herself to caverns, and keepers, and solitudes,
escaping and shining when it could. Was it a prison like hers it was
shut in? and did it grow dark when the lamp left it? Where could be the
way into it?--With that, first she began to look below, as well as above
and around her, and then first noted the tops of the trees between her
and the floor. There were palms with their red-fingered hands full of
fruit, eucalyptus-trees crowded with little boxes of powder puffs,
oleanders with their half-caste roses, and orange-trees with their
clouds of young silver stars and their aged balls of gold. Her eyes
could see colors invisible to ours in the moonlight, and all these she
could distinguish well, though at first she took them for the shapes and
colors of the carpet of the great room. She longed to get down among
them, now she saw they were real creatures, but she did not know how.
She went along the whole length of the wall to the end that crossed the
river, but found no way of going down. Above the river she stopped to
gaze with awe upon the rushing water. She knew nothing of water but from
what she drank and what she bathed in; and as the moon shone on the
dark, swift stream, singing lustily as it flowed, she did not doubt the
river was alive, a swift rushing serpent of life, going--out?-