d when the
surface was covered with a pattern of thorny stems, and a trailing
creeper with curving leaf and twining tendril, and pendent bud and
blossom, I gave it colour. Purples and black only were used, obtained
from the juices of some deeply coloured berries; and when a tint, or
shade, or line failed to satisfy me I erased it, to do it again; and
this so often that I never completed my work. I might, in the proudly
modest spirit of the old sculptors, have inscribed on the vase the
words: Abel was doing this. For was not my ideal beautiful like theirs,
and the best that my art could do only an imperfect copy--a rude sketch?
A serpent was represented wound round the lower portion of the jar,
dull-hued, with a chain of irregular black spots or blotches extending
along its body; and if any person had curiously examined these spots he
would have discovered that every other one was a rudely shaped letter,
and that the letters, by being properly divided, made the following
words:

Sin vos y siu dios y mi.

Words that to some might seem wild, even insane in their extravagance,
sung by some ancient forgotten poet; or possibly the motto of some
love-sick knight-errant, whose passion was consumed to ashes long
centuries ago. But not wild nor insane to me, dwelling alone on a vast
stony plain in everlasting twilight, where there was no motion, nor any
sound; but all things, even trees, ferns, and grasses, were stone.
And in that place I had sat for many a thousand years, drawn up and
motionless, with stony fingers clasped round my legs, and forehead
resting on my knees; and there would I sit, unmoving, immovable, for
many a thousand years to come--I, no longer I, in a universe where she
was not, and God was not.

The days went by, and to others grouped themselves into weeks and
months; to me they were only days--not Saturday, Sunday, Monday, but
nameless. They were so many and their sum so great that all my previous
life, all the years I had existed before this solitary time, now looked
like a small island immeasurably far away, scarcely discernible, in the
midst of that endless desolate waste of nameless days.

My stock of provisions had been so long consumed that I had forgotten
the flavour of pulse and maize and pumpkins and purple and sweet
potatoes. For Nuflo's cultivated patch had been destroyed by the
savages--not a stem, not a root had they left: and I, like the sorrowful
man that broods on his sorrow and the artis