like a long lily-bud sliding from its green sheath, stood a
dryad, and my speech failed and my breath went as I looked upon
her beauty, for which mortality has no simile. Yet was there
something about her of the earth-sweetness that clings even to
the loveliest, star-ambitious, earth- born thing. She was not
all immortal, as man is not all mortal. She was the sweetness of
the strength of the oak, the soul born of the sun kissing its
green leaves in the still Memnonian mornings, of moon and stars
kissing its green leaves in the still Trophonian nights.

"The maid you seek," said she, and again she broke the silence
like the moon breaking through the clouds, "what manner of maid
is she? For a maid abides in this wood, maybe it is she whom you
seek. Is she but a lovely face you seek? Is she but a lofty
mind? Is she but a beautiful soul?"

"Maybe she is all these, though no one only, and more besides,"
I answered.

"It is well," she replied, "but have you in your heart no
image of her you seek? Else how should you know her should you
some day come to meet her?"

"I have no image of her," I said. "I cannot picture her; but
I shall know her, know her inerrably as these your wood children
find out each other untaught, as the butterfly that has never
seen his kindred knows his painted mate, passing on the wing all
others by. Only when the lark shall mate with the nightingale,
and the honey-bee and the clock-beetle keep house together, shall
I wed another maid. Fair maybe she will not be, though fair to