BIRDS IN A VILLAGE 49 



At length during this period there occurred an 

 event which is the obscurest part of his history ; 

 for I know not who or what it was — ^my mind being 

 in a mist about it — that came to or accidentally 

 found him lying on a bed of grass and dried leaves 

 in his thorny hiding-place. It may have been a 

 gipsy or a witch — there were witches in those days 

 — ^who, suddenly looking on his upturned face and 

 seeing the hunger in his unfathomable eyes, loved 

 him, in spite of her malignant nature ; or a spirit 

 out of the earth ; or only a very wise man, an ancient 

 white-haired solitary, whose life had been spent in 

 finding out the secrets of nature. This being, be- 

 coming acquainted with the cause of the boy's 

 grief and of his solitary miserable condition, began 

 to comfort him by telling him that no grief was 

 incurable, no desire that heart could conceive 

 unattainable. He discoursed of the hidden potent 

 properties of nature, unknown only to those who 

 seek not to know them, of the splendid virtue in- 

 herent in all things, Uke the green and violet flames 

 in the clear colourless raindrops which are seen only 

 on rare occasions. Of life and death, he said that 

 life was of the spirit which never dies, that death 

 meant only a passage, a change of abode of the 

 spirit, and the left body crumbled to dust when the 

 spirit went out of it to continue its existence else- 

 where, but that those who hated the thought of such 



