declare that it is nothing but the screaming of the sea birds,
which occasionally resembles bleatings, and occasionally human
lamentations; but belated fishermen swear that they have met an
old shepherd, whose cloak covered head they can never see,
wandering on the sand, between two tides, round the little town
placed so far out of the world. They declare he is guiding and
walking before a he-goat with a man's face and a she-goat with a
woman's face, both with white hair, who talk incessantly,
quarreling in a strange language, and then suddenly cease talking
in order to bleat with all their might.

"Do you believe it?" I asked the monk. "I scarcely know," he
replied; and I continued: "If there are other beings besides
ourselves on this earth, how comes it that we have not known it
for so long a time, or why have you not seen them? How is it that
I have not seen them?"

He replied: "Do we see the hundred-thousandth part of what
exists? Look here; there is the wind, which is the strongest
force in nature. It knocks down men, and blows down buildings,
uproots trees, raises the sea into mountains of water, destroys
cliffs and casts great ships on to the breakers; it kills, it
whistles, it sighs, it roars. But have you ever seen it, and can
you see it? Yet it exists for all that."

I was silent before this simple reasoning. That man was a
philosopher, or perhaps a fool; I could not say which exactly, so
I held my tongue. What he had said had often been in my own
thoughts.