the picture she had promised--the face above "the Warrior." When he
awakened, a sprig of everlasting that he had stuck in the band of his
Alpine hat had blown across his face.




CHAPTER VI

WHEREIN ONE PLAYS AN UNCONSCIOUS PART

Watch a snow flake as it falls! Gentle is too rough a word for the
motion. It floats, a crystal cob-web shot with the glint of
sun-jewels; tangible but melting to your touch, evanescent and
translucent as light; conceived of the wind that bloweth where it
listeth and the gossamer clouds of a vague somewhere.

Waveringly, noiselessly, so noiselessly it comes that you do not catch
the rustling flutter with your ear, but with a sixth sense of motion.
And it transforms, bewitches, beautifies what it touches. I suppose if
such an evanescent thing were told that it and it alone had been the
age-old, time-immemorial sculptor of the granite rocks; that it and it
alone--to paraphrase the words of the scientists--had rolled away the
door from the sepulchers of the eternal rocks and turned a planet into
a sensate earth pulsing with growth--I suppose if a snow flake were
told such heresy, it would die of its own amaze.

This, _apropos_ of nothing in particular, unless you happen to
understand from the catagory of your own experiences.