anished like a mere mirage on the savannah at noon.

It was a day of despair which I spent in this place, sitting all day
indoors, for it was raining hard, immersed in my own gloomy thoughts,
pretending to doze in my seat, and out of the narrow slits of my
half-closed eyes seeing the others, also sitting or moving about, like
shadows or people in a dream; and I cared nothing about them, and wished
not to seem friendly, even for the sake of the food they might offer me
by and by.

Towards evening the rain ceased; and rising up I went out a short
distance to the neighbouring stream, where I sat on a stone and, casting
off my sandals, laved my bruised feet in the cool running water. The
western half of the sky was blue again with that tender lucid blue
seen after rain, but the leaves still glittered with water, and the wet
trunks looked almost black under the green foliage. The rare loveliness
of the scene touched and lightened my heart. Away back in the east
the hills of Parahuari, with the level sun full on them, loomed with a
strange glory against the grey rainy clouds drawing off on that side,
and their new mystic beauty almost made me forget how these same hills
had wearied, and hurt, and mocked me. On that side, also to the north
and south, there was open forest, but to the west a different prospect
met the eye. Beyond the stream and the strip of verdure that fringed it,
and the few scattered dwarf trees growing near its banks, spread a brown
savannah sloping upwards to a long, low, rocky ridge, beyond which rose
a great solitary hill, or rather mountain, conical in form, and clothed
in forest almost to the summit. This was the mountain Ytaioa, the chief
landmark in that district. As the sun went down over the ridge, beyond
the savannah, the whole western sky changed to a delicate rose colour
that had the appearance of rose-coloured smoke blown there by some far
off-wind, and left suspended--a thin, brilliant veil showing through it
the distant sky beyond, blue and ethereal. Flocks of birds, a kind of
troupial, were flying past me overhead, flock succeeding flock, on their
way to their roosting-place, uttering as they flew a clear, bell-like
chirp; and there was something ethereal too in those drops of melodious
sound, which fell into my heart like raindrops falling into a pool to
mix their fresh heavenly water with the water of earth.

Doubtless into the turbid tarn of my heart some sacred drops had
fallen--from t