In the evening after they have brought their cattle home, they sit on the grass before their huts to know that you are among them unseen, to repeat in their songs the name which they have fondly given you. While kings' crowns shine and disappear like falling stars, around village huts your name rises through the still night from the simple hearts of your lovers whose names are unrecorded. 5 In Baby's world, the trees shake their leaves at him, murmuring verses in an ancient tongue that dates from before the age of meaning, and the moon feigns to be of his own age--the solitary baby of night. In the world of the old, flowers dutifully blush at the make-believe of faery legends, and broken dolls confess that they are made of clay. 6 _My world_, when I was a child, you were a little girl-neighbour, a loving timid stranger. Then you grew bold and talked to me across the fence, offering me toys and flowers and shells. Next you coaxed me away from my work, you tempted me into the land of the dusk or the weedy corner of some garden in mid-day loneliness. At length you told me stories about bygone times, with which the present ever longs to meet so as to be rescued from its prison in the moment. 7 How often, great Earth, have I felt my being yearn to flow over you, sharing in the happiness of each green blade that raises its signal banner in answer to the beckoning blue of the sky! I feel as if I had belonged to you ages before I was born. That is why, in the days when the autumn light shimmers on the mellowing ears of rice, I seem to remember a past when my mind was everywhere, and even to hear voices as of playfellows echoing from the remote and deeply veiled past. When, in the evening, the cattle return to their folds, raising dust from the meadow paths, as the moon rises higher than the smoke ascending from the village huts, I feel sad as for some great separation that happened in the first morning of existence. 8 My mind still buzzed with the cares of a busy day; I sat on without noting how twilight was deepening into dark. Suddenly light stirred across the gloom and touched me as with a finger. I lifted my head and met the gaze of the full moon widened in wonder like a child's. It held my eyes for long, and I felt as though a love-letter had been secretly dropped in at my window. And ever since my heart is breaking to write for answer something fragrant as Night's unseen flowers--great as her declaration spelt out in nameless stars. 9 The clouds thicken till the morning light seems like a bedraggled fringe to the rainy night. A little girl stands at her window, still as a rainbow at the gate of a broken-down storm. She is my neighbour, and has come upon the earth like some god's rebellious laughter. Her mother in anger calls her incorrigible; her father smiles and calls her mad. She is like a runaway waterfall leaping over boulders, like the topmost bamboo twig rustling in the restless wind.