A VISIT TO THE PRINCE 261 



written the history, the endurance, the suffering of a 

 lifetime. 



From a bowing acquaintance we passed to a deeper 

 interest, thence to friendship expressed in broken 

 Russian, and ere long the old shepherd promoted us to 

 his inner circle, so that it was not possible to let a day 

 go by without spending an hour at the little kosh on 

 the hill, a skeleton framework of wood, covered in with 

 sheepskins and beech branches. 



Mazan was a pagan poet. He knew nothing of a 

 God, and yet was not without his deity. Pantheism 

 was his creed. Nature his religion. The fragrant 

 earth made him an altar, the leaves whispering in the 

 wind a choir, the toss and churn of the river sang his 

 song of thanksgiving. The throb of the thrush on the 

 silence of dawn was Mazan's idea of Heaven, and the 

 pale moon looking over a balustrade of stars thrilled 

 him to youth again. Every butterfly, fluttering on 

 slender wings, Ariel-like, carried a tender message ; 

 a sentient soul breathed in every blade of grass. 



Mazan was as the earliest poets, Nature-taught. 

 Imaginative minds, untutored, dimly conscious of a 

 shadowy unknown, turn to the earth-mother, and find 

 her all-inspiring. 



Our shepherd could not shape his dreams into the 

 lure of words, or explain how his barren, toneless life 

 was made liveable and beautiful by the rainbow 

 mirage of his fanciful mind, but he could catch the 

 rhythm in the sob of the storm racing apace over the 

 river bars, and hear a sonorous minstrelsy in the crash- 

 ing of mighty branches hurtling to earth before the 



