rse and worse, till it
began to feel the light too much for it, and at last, after one wild
morning of pain, the little soul flickered away from the body, quite
worn to death already, and now but feebly retaining it.

So he wanted another pet; and as there were starlings about the place,
which could be taught to speak, one of them was caught, and he meant to
treat it kindly; but in the night its young ones could be heard crying
after it, and the responsive cry of the mother-bird towards them; and
at last, with the first light, though not till after some debate with
himself, he went down and opened the cage, and saw a sharp bound of the
prisoner up to her nestlings; and therewith came the sense of
remorse,--that he too was become an accomplice in moving, to the limit
of his small power, the springs and handles of that great machine in
things, constructed so ingeniously to play pain-fugues on the delicate
nerve-work of living creatures.

I have remarked how, in the process of our brain-building, as the house
of thought in which we live gets itself together, like some airy
bird's-nest of floating thistle-down and chance straws, compact at
last, little accidents have their consequence; and thus it happened
that, as he [185] walked one evening, a garden gate, usually closed,
stood open; and lo! within, a great red hawthorn in full flower,
embossing heavily the bleached and twisted trunk and branches, so aged
that there were but few green leaves thereon--a plumage of tender,
crimson fire out of the heart of the dry wood. The perfume of the tree
had now and again reached him, in the currents of the wind, over the
wall, and he had wondered what might be behind it, and was now allowed
to fill his arms with the flowers--flowers enough for all the old
blue-china pots along the chimney-piece, making fete in the children's
room. Was it some periodic moment in the expansion of soul within him,
or mere trick of heat in the heavily-laden summer air?

But the beauty of the thing struck home to him feverishly; and in
dreams all night he loitered along a magic roadway of crimson flowers,
which seemed to open ruddily in thick, fresh masses about his feet, and
fill softly all the little hollows in the banks on either side. Always
afterwards, summer by summer, as the flowers came on, the blossom of
the red hawthorn still seemed to him absolutely the reddest of all
things; and the goodly crimson, still alive in the works of old
Venetian