Together, for a long time, they listened in silence to these sounds of purring and breathing and the murmur of rain falling outside: deep, velvety breathing it was, almost inaudible. Everything in life, Paul caught himself reflecting, tragedy or comedy, goes on against a background of this deep, hidden, purring sound of life. Breathing is the first manifestation of life; it is the music of the world, the soft, continuous hum of existence. His thoughts travelled far.... ‘Yes, on the whole,’ he muttered at length inconsequently, ‘I think I may consider myself softer than before—kinder, gentler, more alive!’ But neither Nixie, nor Pouf, nor, for that matter, Sambo and Zezette either, paid the smallest attention to his remark; he was soon lost again in further reflections. It was the child’s voice that presently recalled him. ‘Uncle Paul,’ she said very softly, her mind still busy with thoughts of her own, ‘do you know that sometimes I have heard the earth breathing too—akchilly breathing?’ Paul, coming back from a long journey, turned and gazed at the eager little face beside him in silence. ‘The earth is alive, I’m sure,’ she went on with an air of great mystery. ‘It breathes and whispers, and even purrs; sometimes it cries. It’s a great body, alive—just like you and the other stars——’ ‘Nixie!’ ‘They are all bodies, though; heavenly bodies, Daddy called them. Only we, I suppose, are too small to see it that way perhaps.’ Paul listened, stroking Pouf slowly. The child’s voice was low and somewhat breathless with the excitement of what she was saying. She believed every word of it intensely. Only a very small part of what she was thinking found expression in her words. Her ideas beckoned her beyond; and mere words could not overtake them at her age. ‘The earth,’ she went on, seeing that he did not laugh, ‘is somebody’s big round body rolling down the sky. It simply must be. Daddy always said that a fly settling on our bodies didn’t know we were, alive, so we can’t understand that the earth is alive either. Only _I know it_. Oh!’ she cried out with sudden enthusiasm, ‘how I would love to hear its real out-loud voice. What a t’riffic roar it must be. I only wish my ears were further——’ ‘Sharper, you mean.’ ‘But, all the same, I _have_ heard it breathing,’ she added more quietly, lifting Pouf suddenly and wrapping its sleeping body round her neck like a boa, ‘just like this.’ She put her head on one side, so that her cheek was against the kitten’s lips, and the faint stream of its breathing tickled her ear. ‘Only the breathing of the earth is much, ever so much, longer and deeper. It’s whole months long.’