thyst, shimmered and spangled and sipped and
hovered. And a thin, twangling, immeasurable murmur like the strings of
N[=o][=o]manossi's harp rose from the tiny millions that made their
nests and mounds and burrows in the forest.

Seelem took his sons one by one by the shoulders, and looked into their
eyes, and touched noses. And they lifted their hands in salutation, and
watched him till he was gone from sight. But though his grey face was
all wizened up with trouble and wet with tears, he never so much as once
looked behind him, lest his sons should cry after him, or he turn back.
So, presently, after they all three lifted their hands once more, as if
his Meermut[2] might still haunt near; and then they went home to their
mother.

[2] "Meermut" is shadow, phantom, spectre, or even the pictured
remembrance of anything in the mind.

But the rains came; he did not return. The long days strode softly by,
the chatter and screams of Munza at dawn, the long-drawn, moaning shout
of Mullabruk to Mullabruk as darkness deepened. Nod would sometimes
venture a little way into the forest, hoping to hear the gongs that his
father had told him the close-shorn slaves of Assasimmon tie with
leopard-thongs about their Zevveras' necks. He would sit in the gigantic
shadows of evening, watching the fireflies, and saying to himself: "Sst,
Nod, see what they say--to-morrow!" But the morrow never came that
brought him back his father.

Mutta-matutta cared and cooked for them. She made a great store of
Manaka-cake, packed for coolness all neatly in plantain-leaves;
Nano-cheese, and two or three big pots of Subbub. She kept them clean
and combed; plastered and physicked them; taught them to cook, and many
things else, until, as one by one they grew up, they knew all that she
_could_ teach them, except the wisdom to use what they had learnt. She
would often, too, in the first hush of night, tell them stories of their
father, and of her own father, back even to Zebbah, and the Portingal
dangling with his bunch of wild-cats' tails in the corner.

But as the years wasted away, she grew thin and mournful, and fell ill
of pining and grief and age, and even had at last to keep to her bed of
moss and cotton in the hut.

Her sons worked hard for her, pushing into the forest and across the
narrow swamp in search of fruits to tempt her appetite. Nod heaped up
fresh leaves for her bed, and sang in his shrill, quavering voice every
evening