Once there was a peacock. Never before was so beautiful a peacock as she. She was snow-white except as to her head and tail. Her appearance was something wonderful. From her head down to her shoulders the hues blended and flashed in iridescent green. Whenever she moved herself in the slightest degree there appeared a lighting in color passionately vivid. From about her neck and breast there shone what is known as a lambent flame which at times became tempestuous. So the neck and shoulders melted into the snow-white of the body, a restless glimmering ebbing into a milky way. It was just so with the tail. Well, this peacock was unlike other peacocks. She was not--eh?--she was not morbid, but she was solitary and reflective and intensely emotional and sentimental. Of course she had two feet and had a voice, but the less said of them the better. She would wander up and down by the lakeside and think of all that might be. She scarcely dreamed that there was to come to her what was her secret heart's desire, but in time it came. She met the Purple Herring. With each of them it was a case of infatuation at first sight. Now the Purple Herring was almost as much of an exceptional case as the Pale Peacock. He was the only purple herring in all the great lakes, and was practically the King of the Herrings, and was respected as such. Personally, he had in his nature many of the traits of the Pale Peacock. He, too, was emotional, faithful, and impassioned. They loved. Here was a most unfortunate situation. Naturally, the Purple Herring could not get along very well upon the land, and, naturally too, the Peacock could not flourish in the water. It was not exactly a case of Platonic love; it was a case of hopeless love, in a way, and yet, not altogether hopeless, for they were happy. It came to this, that they made the best of things, and that the Peacock, day after day, would wander along upon the sands which the water lapped, while the Herring would swim along beside her, and they would exchange tender confidences, and that, to amuse her, he would tell her tales, many tales, of the wonders of the vasty deep of the lake. He told her why the fish flies came in autumn and smeared the windows and made slippery the sidewalks of the great city; of how they lay in the mud at the bottom of the lake, like little short sticks, and then finally burst open and came to the surface and floated away into town. He told her of his talk with Mrs. Whitefish, and of how she did not think the spawn was getting along as well as usual. He told her of a thousand things, and they were happy. They often talked too, this united yet effectually separated pair, of what they saw upon the shores of the placid lake, whose creamy sands, outside the city, sloped down to the water's edge from green fields and waving groves.