and women, Gnulemah!"

She lifted her face and hand in eloquent astonishment.

"O, what a world!" she exclaimed in her low-toned way. "But are the
women all like me?"

"There is not one like you," answered Balder, with the quiet emphasis
of conviction. How refreshing was it thus to set aside conventionalism!
Her ingenuousness brought forth the like from him.

"Have you never wished to go beyond the wall?" he asked her.

"Yes, often!" she said, fingering the golden serpent thoughtfully.
"But that could not be unless I put out the lamp. Sometimes I get
tired of this world,--it has changed since I first came to it."

"Is it less beautiful?"

"It is smaller than it used to be," said Gnulemah, pensively. "Once
the house was so high, it seemed to touch heaven;--see how it has
dwindled since then! And so with other things that are on earth. The
stars and the sun and clouds, they have not changed!"

"That is a consolation, is it not?" observed Balder, between a smile
and a sigh. Gnulemah was not the first to charge upon the world the
alterations in the individual; nor the first, either, to find comfort
in the constancy of Heaven.

She went on, won to further confidence by her listener's sympathy,--

"I used to hope the wall would one day become so low that I might pass
over it. But it has ceased to change, and is still too high. Shall I
ever see the other side?"

"It can be broken down if need be. But you might go far before
finding a world so fair as this. Perhaps it would be better to stand
on the cliff, and only look forth across the river."

"I cannot stay always here," returned Gnulemah, shaking her turbaned
head, with its gleaming bandeau and rattling pendants. "But no wall is
between me and the sky; the flame of my lamp goes upward, and why
should not Gnulemah?"

"A friend is the only world one does not tire of," he replied after a
pause. "You have lacked companions."

Gnulemah glanced down at the hoopoe, who forthwith warbled aloud and
fluttered up to her shoulder. The bird was her companion, and so,
likewise, were the plants and flowers. Gnulemah could converse with
them in their own language. Nature was her friend and confidant, and
intimately communed with her.

All this was conveyed to Balder's apprehension, not by words, but by
some subtile expressiveness of eye and gesture. Gnulemah could give
voiceless utterances in a manner pregnant and felicitous almost beyond
belief.

"I meet also a beauti