“This king was a poet and dreamer, as well as a great warrior and prince, and he had ever been wont to have communion with the powers and sweet influences which are behind the innumerable veils of the world. Through these he had come to know the mystery of the Spirit of Life. “With this Eternal Spirit he held communion in his deep sorrow. It was then that he learned how what is beautiful cannot pass, for beauty is like life that is mortal, but whose essence does not perish. In fragrance, in colour, in sweet sound, somehow and somewhere, that which is beautiful is transmuted when suddenly changed or slain. “So he prayed to the Spirit of Life that his dear ones might not pass from him utterly. “On the morrow, when he rose and went into his favourite place in the royal gardens, a secret hollow in a glade of ilex and pine, he saw a fountain of exceeding beauty. The spray rose dazzling white against the sombre green of the old trees, and seemed to be alive with a myriad rainbow-spirits, who ceaselessly flashed their wings as they darted hither and thither. The king was looking upon this, entranced by its sunny loveliness, when he noticed a white dove flying round the high sunlit fount, and at the hither margin of the water a cream-white dappled fawn, which stooped its graceful neck and drank. “The king marvelled; for not only had there never been any fountain in that place, but he knew that no wild fawn could wander there from the distant forests, and no dove had he ever seen so snowy white and with wings radiant as though stained by the rainbow-hues of the flying spray. “Suddenly it was as though a mist fell from his eyes. He saw and understood. His old mother, his wife, his little son, had not passed away, although they were dead. His mother had been fair and beautiful even in her white-hair years; and of the beauty of his wife, whom he loved so passing well, the poets had sung from one end of the land to another; while his little son had been held to be so perfect that there was none like him. “And now the king saw that the beauty of his mother had passed into a living fount of waters, whose spray cooled the air and made a sound of aerial music and a laughing radiance everywhere; and that the beauty of the woman whom he had loved so passing well was transmuted into the wild fawn which drank at the water’s edge; and that the beauty of his little son was now the white dove which beat its wings in the rainbow spray. “The king rejoiced therein with a great joy. Many of his people thought him mad, but he smiled at that saying, and with grave eyes prayed that that madness would come to all true and noble souls in his kingdom.