The smith was my friend. At his dim threshold I often questioned him, and the whole smithy always answered me. The sparks laughed in the coal, and syllables of metal fashioned a mysterious and profound language which moved me like the words of duty. And I experienced there almost the same feelings as in the home of the humble cobbler. One day the smith fell ill. His breath grew short, and I noticed that now when he pulled the chain of the bellows, formerly so powerful, it also gasped and gradually caught the sickness of its master. The man's heart beat with sudden jumps, and I heard plainly that the hammer struck the iron irregularly as he brandished it above the anvil. And in the same degree as the light in the eyes of the man faded, the flame of the hearth grew dim. In the evenings it wavered more and more, and there were long intervals when the light vanished on the walls and ceiling. One day while at work the man felt his extremities turn to ice. In the evening he died. I entered the smithy. It was cold as a body deprived of life. One small ember glowed alone under the chimney, humble and watching, like the praying women that I found later beside the death-bed. Three months later I went into the abandoned workshop to help evaluate his small amount of property. Everything was damp and black as in a vault. The leather of the bellows was filled with holes where it had rotted. When we tried to pull the chain it came loose from the wood. And the simple people who were making the appraisal with me declared: "This forge and these hammers are worn out. They ended their life with the master." Then I was _moved_, because I _understood_ the mysterious meaning of these words. TO STONES Brilliant sisters of the torrents that I find on the shore of the Alpine lake: you are the stones loved by the rainbow and the azure cold, on you falls the white salt which is licked up by the lambs, you are mirrors whose light is iridescent as the pigeon's breast, you have more eyes than the peacock, you are crystallized by fire and your veins of snow have become eternal, you have been the companions of primordial cataclysms, you were washed by the sea and then rocked by it until the dove from the ark cooed with love at sight of you.... The gleaming grain of your flesh at times has the blue-veined whiteness of a child's wrist, at times it has the golden coppery hue of the thigh of a heavy and beautiful woman, sometimes it is silvered with mica like a cheek in the sunlight, sometimes it is brown like the complexion of those in whom the dead blondness of tobacco is blended with the gold of the mandarin orange.