birth to one younger than myself, later than
myself....'

"'Your old self will reappear more beautiful, new-souled,
transfigured,' I replied.

"Then my companion looked at me with eyes that were full both of
yearning and of pain, and he said, 'Though I would fain stay with you,
yet must I go apart. For I have one battle yet to fight, and that I
can only fight alone. Farewell, dear friend, husband of the woman that
is in me!'

"Then said I farewell and we embraced and parted, for I saw that it
was meet for him to commune alone with God and gain strength to win
his victory.

"The town lay in the west; he went into the north and I into the east.
Once more I was alone."

"Come, let us devise new means of happiness," said my companion. "Let
us wander up-stream to the silent cradle of the river. For all day
long I hear the river calling my name."

And we journeyed a three days' tramp into the mountains, following the
silver river upward and upward to the pure fountain of its birth. And
on the way, moved by the glow of intercourse, I told my companion the
story of Zenobia, and also that of the old pilgrim whom I met at New
Athos. It was strange to us that the peasants in the country should
live and die so much more worthily than the educated folk who live in
the towns. God made the country, man made the town, and the devil made
the country town, was not for us an idle platitude but a burning fact,
though we agreed that man was often a much more evil creator than the
devil, and that the great capitals of Europe and America were the
worst places for Man's heavenly spirit that Time had ever known.

Imagine our three days' journeying, the joy of the lonely one who has
found a companion, the sharing of happiness that is doubling it; the
beauty to live in, the little daintinesses and prettinesses of Nature
to point out; the morning, sun-decked and dewy, the wide happiness of
noon, the shadows of the great rocks where we rested, and the flash of
the green and silver river tumbling outside in the sunshine; quiescent
evening and the old age of the day, sunset and the remembrance of the
day's glory, the pathos of looking back to the golden morning.

The first night we made our bed where the plover has her nest, in a
grassy hollow on the shelf of a mountain.

"The day is done," said my companion. "A little space of time has
died. Now see the vision of the Eternal, which comes after death;" and
he pointed to the night sky, in