emselves from sight, but whose voices he
certainly heard; but he was never afraid. One night he saw a very
beautiful thing; it had been a still day, but there was an anxious
sound in the wind which he knew portended a storm; he was strangely
restless on such days, and woke many times in the night: at last he
could bear the silence of the cave no more, and went out, descending
swiftly by the rocks, the path over which he could have now followed
blindfold, down to the edge of the sea. Then he saw that the waves
that beat against the rock were all luminous, as though lit with an
inner light; suddenly, far below, how deep he knew not, he saw a great
shoal of fish, some of them very large, coming softly round the rocks;
the water, as it touched their blunt snouts, burst as it were into
soft flame, and showed every twinkle of their fins and every beat of
their tails. The shoal came swiftly round the rocks, swimming
intently, and it seemed as though there was no end of them. But at
last the crowd grew thinner and then ceased; but he could still see
the water rippling all radiant in the great sea-pools, showing the
motion of broad ribbons of seaweed that swayed to and fro, and
lighting up odd horned beasts that stirred upon the ledges. From that
day forth he was often filled with a silent wonder at all the
sleepless life that moved beneath the vast waters, and that knew
nothing of the little human lives that fretted themselves out in the
thin air above. That day was to him like the opening of a door into
the vast heart of God.

But for all his happiness, the thought weighed upon him, day after
day, of all the grief and unhappiness that there was about him. A
dying bird that he found in a pool, and that rolled its filmy eye upon
him in fear, as if to ask why he must disturb it in its last sad
languid hour, the terror in which so many of the small fish abode--he
saw once, when the sea was clear, a big fish dart like a dark shadow,
with open mouth and gleaming eye, on a little shoal of fishes that
sported joyfully in the sun; they scattered in haste, but they had
lost their fellows--all this made him ponder; but most of all there
weighed on his heart the thought of the world he had left, of how men
spoke evil of each other, and did each other hurt; of children whose
lot was to be beaten and cursed for no fault, but to please the cruel
temper of a master; of patient women, who had so much to bear--so that
sometimes he had dark tho