"The other day a bird fell out of it, one of the young ones, pushed out by a housecleaning mother, I suppose. It killed the poor little feathered gawk. I saw Gargoyle run, quick as a flash, and pick it up. He pushed open the closing eyes, tried to place the bird on a hollyhock stalk, to spread its wings, in every way to give it motion. When, after each attempt, he saw it fall to the ground, he stood still, looking at it very hard. Suddenly, to my surprise, he seemed to understand something, to _comprehend_ it fully and delightedly. He laughed." Strang stopped, looking intently at his wife. "I can imagine that laugh," she mused. Strang shook his head. "I don't think you can. It--it wasn't pleasant. It was as uncanny as the rest of the little chap--a long, rattling, eerie sound, as if a tree should groan or a butterfly curse; but wait--there's more." In his earnestness Strang sat up, adding, "Then Gargoyle got up and stretched out his hands, not to the sky, but to the air all around him. It was as if--" Here Strang, the normal, healthy man of the world, hesitated; it was only the father of the little boy who had died who admitted in low tones: "You would have said--At least even _I_ could imagine that Gargoyle--well--that he _saw_ something like a released principle of life fly happily back to its main source--as if a little mote like a sunbeam should detach itself from a clod and, disembodied, dart back to its law of motion." For a long time they were silent, listening to the call of an oven-bird far back in the spring trees. At last Strang got up, filled his pipe, and puffed at it savagely before he said, "Of course the whole thing's damned nonsense." He repeated that a little brutally to his wife's silence before in softened voice he added, "Only, perhaps you're right, Evelyn; perhaps we, too, should be seeing that kind of thing, understanding what, God knows, we long to understand, if we had 'undressed minds,' if we hadn't from earliest infancy been smeared all over with the plaster-of-Paris of 'normal thinking.'"