T- I'JfH 
A CHILD OF NATURE 
nesses, scourges for one's sins, 
rewards for one's virtues, and a 
plan of things which was taken 
apart and put together again, like 
a vast and uninteresting puzzle. 
Sometimes out of all this confusion 
of sounds a word, a sentence, a pic- 
ture, an incident suddenly came to 
life and glowed for a moment and 
caught the boy with a thrill so in- 
tense that it was a pain ; and then 
the fog of an unknown language 
drifted in, and the glimpse of some- 
thing human and beautiful vanished. 
The atmosphere was lifeless, cold 
and grey ; some vast system of 
magic, remote, lying far apart from 
anything he knew or felt, seemed 
to hold possession of the little meet- 
[38] 
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