lows through the
ruins. The water flows, the clouds pass on, the ancient trees tremble,
the breeze murmurs.

Suddenly, through the shadow thrown by the overhanging wood, which
stretches far into endless depths, a human form appears. It is a woman.
She advances slowly towards the ruins. She has reached them. She treads
the once sacred ground. This woman is pale, her look sad, her long robe
floats on the wind, her feet covered with dust. She walks with difficulty
and pain. A block of stone is placed near the stream, almost at the foot
of the statue of John the Baptist. Upon this stone she sinks breathless
and exhausted, worn out with fatigue. And yet, for many days, many years,
many centuries, she has walked on unwearied.

For the first time, she feels an unconquerable sense of lassitude. For
the first time, her feet begin to fail her. For the first time, she, who
traversed, with firm and equal footsteps, the moving lava of torrid
deserts, while whole caravans were buried in drifts of fiery sand--who
passed, with steady and disdainful tread, over the eternal snows of
Arctic regions, over icy solitudes, in which no other human being could
live--who had been spared by the devouring flames of conflagrations, and
by the impetuous waters of torrents--she, in brief, who for centuries had
had nothing in common with humanity--for the first time suffers mortal
pain.

Her feet bleed, her limbs ache with fatigue, she is devoured by burning
thirst. She feels these infirmities, yet scarcely dares to believe them
real. Her joy would be too immense! But now, her throat becomes dry,
contracted, all on fire. She sees the stream, and throws herself on her
knees, to quench her thirst in that crystal current, transparent as a
mirror. What happens then? Hardly have her fevered lips touched the
fresh, pure water, than, still kneeling, supported on her hands, she
suddenly ceases to drink, and gazes eagerly on the limpid stream.
Forgetting the thirst which devours her, she utters a loud cry--a cry of
deep, earnest, religious joy, like a note of praise and infinite
gratitude to heaven. In that deep mirror, she perceives that she has
grown older.

In a few days, a few hours, a few minutes, perhaps in a single second,
she has attained the maturity of age. She, who for more than eighteen
centuries has been as a woman of twenty, carrying through successive
generations the load of her imperishable youth--she has grown old, and
may, perhaps, at le