le flames. Life
was rich. We hob-nobbed together. We doubled all our happinesses, and
we promised to share all our griefs. Sitting on the rocks--there were
many of them about, of all shape and size--we taught one another
songs. I wrote songs; he sang them. I told him of places where I had
been; he described them to me so that they lived again before me.
I told him of beauteous women I had met; he had met them also and
revealed to me their loving hearts. He could give the leaping love
in my heart a precious name. I verily believe that when the sun was
setting golden behind a great cliff, he could bid it stop and shine
upon us an hour longer.

Timid and shy at first, he grew more daring afterwards and interpreted
my wishes even before I was myself aware of them. He was constantly
devising some new happiness. His bird's heart was a fast overflowing
fountain.

Then when rainy days came we crouched together in the cave like
night-birds sheltered from the day, and we whispered and recounted
and planned. I scribbled in my diary in pencil, and he re-wrote my
scribbling in bright-coloured chalks, and drew side pictures and wrote
poems. Many are the pages we thus wrote together; some he wrote, some
I wrote, and there are many from both of us in this volume. When
I thought to make a book he laughed and said, "You are making to
yourself a graven image." He held it idolatry to imagine that
beautiful visions could be represented in words.

"I shall not worship the book," I urged.

"Other people may, or they may revile it," he answered, laughing.
"It's the same sin."

"Lest they worship or revile idolatrously, I shall write a notice,"
said I. "For though I praise Nature ill, and express her ill, she, the
wonderful spirit, is beyond all praise or blame." And I wrote these
words: "_Lest any one should think that in these pages life itself is
accounted for, any beauty set down in words, any yearning defined, or
sadness utterly plumbed, it is hereby notified that such appreciation
is false--that in these pages lies only the symbol of life, the
guide-post to the hearts of those who wrote the words. Follow, gentle
reader, the directions we have given; tread the roads that we have
trod, and see again what we have seen._"

To which I added this note: "_The poetry is from my companion's pen,
the prose from mine._"

And my companion, not content with that, wrote a postscript: "_There
is no prose, and the pen by itself writes nothing a