n a few hours,
and never forget again. We take a strange satisfaction in working
arithmetical problems. We pause in our building to cover the stones with
figures and calculations. We save money for a Latin Grammar and Algebra,
and carry them about in our pockets, poring over them as over our Bible
of old. We have thought we were utterly stupid, incapable of remembering
anything, of learning anything. Now we find that all is easy. Has a new
soul crept into this old body, that even our intellectual faculties are
changed? We marvel; not perceiving that what a man expends in prayer and
ecstasy he cannot have over for acquiring knowledge. You never shed a
tear, or create a beautiful image, or quiver with emotion, but you pay
for it at the practical, calculating end of your nature. You have just
so much force: when the one channel runs over the other runs dry.

And now we turn to Nature. All these years we have lived beside her, and
we have never seen her; and now we open our eyes and look at her.

The rocks have been to us a blur of brown: we bend over them, and
the disorganised masses dissolve into a many-coloured, many-shaped,
carefully-arranged form of existence. Here masses of rainbow-tinted
crystals, half-fused together; there bands of smooth grey and red
methodically overlying each other. This rock here is covered with
a delicate silver tracery, in some mineral, resembling leaves and
branches; there on the flat stone, on which we so often have sat to weep
and pray, we look down, and see it covered with the fossil footprints of
great birds, and the beautiful skeleton of a fish. We have often tried
to picture in our mind what the fossiled remains of creatures must
be like, and all the while we sat on them, we have been so blinded by
thinking and feeling that we have never seen the world.

The flat plain has been to us a reach of monotonous red. We look at it,
and every handful of sand starts into life. That wonderful people, the
ants, we learn to know; see them make war and peace, play and work, and
build their huge palaces. And that smaller people we make acquaintance
with, who live in the flowers. The bitto flower has been for us a mere
blur of yellow; we find its heart composed of a hundred perfect flowers,
the homes of the tiny black people with red stripes, who move in and out
in that little yellow city. Every bluebell has its inhabitant. Every day
the karoo shows us a new wonder sleeping in its teeming bosom.

O