wn the bird-songs. Some of the hills beside
us were clothed with green shrubs, and some were gaunt and bare, of
homely gray splashed with red. Ahead there was a wee white house,
apparently balanced like an eagle's nest in an inaccessible eyrie. The
orchards had gone, but the stony land was still scratched up to receive
crops, and laboriously terraced to keep the soil from being swilled
into the sea.

The hills pressed farther together into a rocky gorge, with the rut of
the road perched high on one side, and the stream brawling away fifty
feet below. Goats with tinkling bells were flitting about the crags
like so many brown flies. One began to wonder whether the road was not
a _cul-de-sac_, and whether Valledemosa did not lie in some other
direction. There seemed absolutely no outlet except for wings.

But with an angle of the gorge one opened out a new scene. Another wide
valley lay ahead of us, through which the road wound steeply, past
women gathering the purple olives from the turf beneath the trees, past
laden orange-trees, and sprawls of prickly pears, and fields of
sprouting beans.

And then we came to two yellow gate-posts, on one of which was the date
1063, whilst the other bore this inscription: "VITAE IN INTROITV AEDIS
SANCTAE EXUS."

"Valledemosa is here," said my companion, "the village beside that
convent where Madame Dudevant brought Chopin to die, and from which she
took him away full of new life. The mules will bait here. It is for you
to say whether we go on or return to Palma."

"From the day when I lost my eyes to this day," was my reply, "I have
never known what it was to see the shapes that God has builded on the
face of the earth, or the colours with which He has painted them. Mind,
I have never whined for the sight that was taken away from me. I have
accepted my _Kismet_, and have made it as bright as thought and
contrivance could manage. I believe, without egotism, that there are
few blind men who have trained themselves to be as conscious of their
surroundings as I am. But my powers have great limitations. However
preternaturally sensitive a man may be to all manner of sounds, he
cannot tell everything from sound alone, not even though his sense of
touch besides is laboriously refined. Without the gift of sight there
must always be (so I had been forced to decide) a black gaping hiatus
which it seemed that no human power could fill. Of my helpers, till
yesterday, Sadi was the only one who