When I came back to the terrace under the star-lit night of March, I looked at the sky, and it seemed that a child was walking there treasuring many lamps behind her veils. If their light went out, she would suddenly stop and a cry would sound from sky to sky, "Father, I have lost myself!" 14 The evening stood bewildered among street lamps, its gold tarnished by the city dust. A woman, gaudily decked and painted, leant over the rail of her balcony, a living fire waiting for its moths. Suddenly an eddy was formed in the road round a street-boy crushed under the wheels of a carriage, and the woman on the balcony fell to the floor screaming in agony, stricken with the grief of the great white-robed Mother who sits in the world's inner shrine. 15 I remember the scene on the barren heath--a girl sat alone on the grass before the gipsy camp, braiding her hair in the afternoon shade. Her little dog jumped and barked at her busy hands, as though her employment had no importance. In vain did she rebuke it, calling it "a pest," saying she was tired of its perpetual silliness. She struck it on the nose with her reproving forefinger, which only seemed to delight it the more. She looked menacingly grave for a few moments, to warn it of impending doom; and then, letting her hair fall, quickly snatched it up in her arms, laughed, and pressed it to her heart. 16 He is tall and lean, withered to the bone with long repeated fever, like a dead tree unable to draw a single drop of sap from anywhere. In despairing patience, his mother carries him like a child into the sun, where he sits by the roadside in the shortening shadows of each forenoon. The world passes by--a woman to fetch water, a herd-boy with cattle to pasture, a laden cart to the distant market--and the mother hopes that some least stir of life may touch the awful torpor of her dying son. 17 If the ragged villager, trudging home from the market, could suddenly be lifted to the crest of a distant age, men would stop in their work and shout and run to him in delight. For they would no longer whittle down the man into the peasant, but find him full of the mystery and spirit of his age. Even his poverty and pain would grow great, released from the shallow insult of the present, and the paltry things in his basket would acquire pathetic dignity. 18 With the morning he came out to walk a road shaded by a file of deodars, that coiled the hill round like importunate love. He held the first letter from his newly wedded wife in their village home, begging him to come to her, and come soon. The touch of an absent hand haunted him as he walked, and the air seemed to take up the cry of the letter: "Love, my love, my sky is brimming with tears!" He asked himself in wonder, "How do I deserve this?" The sun suddenly appeared over the rim of the blue hills, and four girls from a foreign shore came with swift strides, talking loud and followed by a barking dog.