now when he pulled the chain of the bellows, formerly so powerful, it
also gasped and gradually caught the sickness of its master. The man's
heart beat with sudden jumps, and I heard plainly that the hammer
struck the iron irregularly as he brandished it above the anvil. And
in the same degree as the light in the eyes of the man faded, the
flame of the hearth grew dim. In the evenings it wavered more and
more, and there were long intervals when the light vanished on the
walls and ceiling.

One day while at work the man felt his extremities turn to ice. In the
evening he died. I entered the smithy. It was cold as a body deprived
of life. One small ember glowed alone under the chimney, humble
and watching, like the praying women that I found later beside the
death-bed.

Three months later I went into the abandoned workshop to help evaluate
his small amount of property. Everything was damp and black as in a
vault. The leather of the bellows was filled with holes where it had
rotted. When we tried to pull the chain it came loose from the wood.
And the simple people who were making the appraisal with me declared:

"This forge and these hammers are worn out. They ended their life with
the master."

Then I was _moved_, because I _understood_ the mysterious meaning of
these words.

TO STONES

Brilliant sisters of the torrents that I find on the shore of the
Alpine lake: you are the stones loved by the rainbow and the azure
cold, on you falls the white salt which is licked up by the lambs, you
are mirrors whose light is iridescent as the pigeon's breast, you
have more eyes than the peacock, you are crystallized by fire and your
veins of snow have become eternal, you have been the companions of
primordial cataclysms, you were washed by the sea and then rocked by
it until the dove from the ark cooed with love at sight of you....

The gleaming grain of your flesh at times has the blue-veined
whiteness of a child's wrist, at times it has the golden coppery hue
of the thigh of a heavy and beautiful woman, sometimes it is silvered
with mica like a cheek in the sunlight, sometimes it is brown like the
complexion of those in whom the dead blondness of tobacco is blended
with the gold of the mandarin orange.

You are stones that have been broken by the heart of the torrent, you
have been dashed against each other and have been tossed about amid
the daphnes of the ravine, you have been whipped by hailstorms and
tempest