For a while Tom's quest was in healing--his small hands were always laid upon our hurts, serious eyes staring upwards. It seemed to awaken the past in his soul. Gradually his bent turned to other things. When we went to the country to live, he saw Nature for the first time. Tom was very much at home with the old Mother. He loved the living things that most children fear; the bees and beetles, the blind little beings that live in the earth and the small, red-tongued garter-snakes. He often spoke of a life he had lived with the snakes--of the big ones that used to love him and curl around his neck. I never could help shuddering a little at the thought, but Tom would explain, "They won't hurt you if you love them. Then they will love you too. Snakes feel just what you feel--if you're afraid of them, they get mad." Again I would think of India--the great cobras that sit before a pure master, opening their hoods to listen to his chanting. Tom knew what purity meant, a deep-down purity like the earth itself. Why should anything hurt him?... He used to hold the bees in his hands and walk through a cloud of double-winged beetles with utmost carelessness. Many times he has led me through a cloud of them, murmuring, "They won't hurt you." Once he disturbed a honeybee in the late afternoon, drunken and senseless on the fragrant flowers. It stung him. He shook it off his hand and said in a disgusted voice, "That wasn't my bee!" A little later Tom discovered the Unseen of Nature. I mean that it ceased to be the unseen to him. The fairies opened their mysterious arms, and we saw little of him for a time, so lost was he in their wonder. There was a small rock in the front yard that he used to sit on when he was looking for them. The busy brown gnomes appeared to him first--often rolling pebbles down the cliff, or gathering leaves in their little aprons. Then the tree-nymphs would come to him; so green and fresh and sweet--with bright eyes and coaxing hands. He would follow laughingly what they said and did, always explaining to us later what they _meant_. And he saw the spirits of the water, far out over the lake, mingled with the sunlight. They gave him much, he said, but he would like to have gone out to them. He said that burning wood unlocked the fire fairies--let them out into freedom and light. He loved to build fires on the beach, watching carefully the leaping and spreading of the flames. The salamanders were responsible for the spreading, he thought, and used to watch their little red hands at work. His eyes seemed to melt as they stared so far and deeply into things--way past the _seen_ into that which is nothingness to most of us. And he would come back slowly as though it were hard to detach himself from the enchantment. Always we kept very still at such a time, for fear we hurry him.