The man drew me more and more. He had a way of talking about things
seldom mentioned except in dull fashion in the pulpit, as if he cared
about them. He spoke as of familiar things, but made you feel he was
looking out of a high window. There are many who never speak of real
things except in a false tone; this man spoke of such without an atom
of assumed solemnity--in his ordinary voice: they came into his mind
as to their home--not as dreams of the night, but as facts of the day.

I sat for a while, gazing up through the thin veil of water at the
blue sky so far beyond. I thought how like that veil was to our little
life here, overdomed by that boundless foreshortening of space. The
lines in Shelley's _Adonais_ came to me:

"Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass,
Stains the white radiance of Eternity,
Until Death tramples it to fragments."

Then I thought of what my host had said concerning the too short lives
of horses, and wondered what he would say about those of dogs.

"Dogs are more intelligent than horses," I said: "why do they live a
yet shorter time?"

"I doubt if you would say so in an Arab's tent," he returned. "If you
had said, 'still more affectionate,' I should have known better how to
answer you."

"Then I do say so," I replied.