s it came from
nothing but the "waste shining of the sky." At all events, there they
were, remembered again, looking at me from the past, blue eyes that were
beautiful and dear to me, whose blue colour was associated with every
sweetness and charm in child and woman and with all that is best and
highest in human souls; and I could not and had no wish to resist their
appeal.

Then came a new experience of the eye that is blue--a meeting with one
who almost seemed to be less flesh than spirit. A middle-aged lady,
frail, very frail; exceedingly pale from long ill-health, prematurely
white-haired, with beautiful grey eyes, gentle but wonderfully bright.
Altogether she was like a being compounded as to her grosser part of
foam and mist and gossamer and thistledown, and was swayed by every
breath of air, and who, should she venture abroad in rough weather,
would be lifted and blown away by the gale and scattered like mist
over the earth. Yet she, so frail, so timid, was the one member of
the community who had set herself to do the work of a giant--that of
championing all ill-used and suffering creatures, wild or tame, holding
a protecting shield over them against the innate brutality of the
people. She had been abused and mocked and jeered at by many, while
others had regarded her action with an amused smile or else with a cold
indifference. But eventually some, for very shame, had been drawn to her
side, and a change in the feeling of the people had resulted; domestic
animals were treated better, and it was no longer universally believed
that all wild animals, especially those with wings, existed only that
men might amuse themselves by killing and wounding and trapping and
caging and persecuting them in various other ways.

The sight of that burning and shining spirit in its frail tenement--for
did I not actually see her spirit and the very soul of her in those
eyes?--was the last of the unforgotten experiences I had at that place
which had startled and repelled me with its ugliness.

But, no, there was one more, marvellous as any--the experience of a day
of days, one of those rare days when nature appears to us spiritualized
and is no longer nature, when that which had transfigured this visible
world is in us too, and it becomes possible to believe--it is almost a
conviction--that the burning and shining spirit seen and recognized in
one among a thousand we have known is in all of us and in all things. In
such moments it