ier-polished
granite, then in a chaos of dome and spire, and finally breaks up against
the sky in a serrated edge like the top-crest of a great wind-flagellated
wave which, attacking Heaven, should have been suddenly petrified by a
Word.

On the border of the pine-forest, its one door upon the meadow and facing
the lake, is a log-cabin.

It is early morning, and the air is crisp and cold. To the left of the
cabin, in the dusk of the trees, a fuzzy little donkey stands immobile as
if still frozen by the night.

The sun, still behind the high crest to the east, aureoles it with rose;
its light passes in a broad sheet athwart the sky, leaving the meadow in
a lower darkish plane, as if in the still half-light of a profound sea;
it strikes here and there, among the pinnacles, a glacier that
scintillates frigidly. To the west, above the plain, which is as yet but
an opalescent gray shift, the last star hangs humidly, like a tear at the
end of a lash.

The rose halo deepens along the mountain top; the dark-blue dome of the
sky fills with a lighter azure; the star swoons, and the sun peers over
the crest. It ascends. Its rays plunge into the pool of darkness still
upon the meadow; they pierce it, at first separately as with rapier
thrusts, and then finally billow down into it in a cascade of molten
gold. The shadows flee; the sunlight strikes the cabin; and
Charles-Norton Sims appears at the door.

Immediately, the little donkey, rousing to life, comes braying to him
across the green. Charles-Norton gives him a handful of salt, and with a
slap sends him off again.

And then he stands in the door-way with arms folded, facing the sun. He
is nude--except for the abbreviated swimming-trunks which were his last
buy in New York--and to the light his skin, polished like ivory, takes on
a warm and subtle glow. From his shoulders there hangs behind him, to his
heels, something that might be a cloak, except that it does not cloak
him. It does not envelop him; rather does it stand behind him in
ornamental background, with a certain sculptural effect. And it is white,
a wondrous gleaming white, against which the whiteness of his skin seems
rosy. Starting from his shoulders, it goes out and up in gentle
undulation to either side, and then descends in two swift slight curves
that meet in a gothic tip at his heels. It is in shape like a Greek urn,
but has with it a flowing quality--and the whiteness. It is like a Greek
urn of pure ala