en aback the stranger laughed. It was as though a curious little
tadpole which he held under his glass should suddenly lift its tail and
begin to question him.

"I?--no." He laughed his short thick laugh. "I am a man who believes
nothing, hopes nothing, fears nothing, feels nothing. I am beyond the
pale of humanity; no criterion of what you should be who live here among
your ostriches and bushes."

The next moment the stranger was surprised by a sudden movement on the
part of the fellow, which brought him close to the stranger's feet. Soon
after he raised his carving and laid it across the man's knee.

"Yes, I will tell you," he muttered; "I will tell you all about it."

He put his finger on the grotesque little mannikin at the bottom (ah!
that man who believed nothing, hoped nothing, felt nothing; how he loved
him!), and with eager finger the fellow moved upward, explaining over
fantastic figures and mountains, to the crowning bird from whose wing
dropped a feather. At the end he spoke with broken breath--short words,
like one who utters things of mighty import.

The stranger watched more the face than the carving; and there was now
and then a show of white teeth beneath the moustaches as he listened.

"I think," he said blandly, when the boy had done, "that I partly
understand you. It is something after this fashion, is it not?" (He
smiled.) "In certain valleys there was a hunter." (He touched the
grotesque little figure at the bottom.) "Day by day he went to hunt for
wild-fowl in the woods; and it chanced that once he stood on the shores
of a large lake. While he stood waiting in the rushes for the coming
of the birds, a great shadow fell on him, and in the water he saw a
reflection. He looked up to the sky; but the thing was gone. Then a
burning desire came over him to see once again that reflection in the
water, and all day he watched and waited; but night came and it had not
returned. Then he went home with his empty bag, moody and silent. His
comrades came questioning about him to know the reason, but he answered
them nothing; he sat alone and brooded. Then his friend came to him, and
to him he spoke.

"'I have seen today,' he said, 'that which I never saw before--a vast
white bird, with silver wings outstretched, sailing in the everlasting
blue. And now it is as though a great fire burnt within my breast. It
was but a sheen, a shimmer, a reflection in the water; but now I desire
nothing more on earth than