Fie, thou traitor! Plump in the swamp and the wayfarer's shoe behind! But that might have been expected. Deceit and treachery are thy favorite pastimes, thou wayward freak of heaven. People wonder now that men of primitive times made a God of thee. The Grecian girl once called thee Selene, and wreathed thy cup with purple poppies, by thy magic to lure back the faithless lover to her door. But that is now all over. We have science and phosphorus, and thou hast degenerated into a wretched old Juggler. A Juggler! And people show thee too much consideration, to treat thee as a thing of life even. What art thou, anyhow? A ball of burnt out slag, blistered, airless, colorless, waterless. A ball? Why our scientists know that thou art not even round--caught in a lie again! We people on the earth have pulled thee out of shape. In truth thou art pointed, thou hast a wretched and unsymmetrical figure. Thou'rt a sort of big turnip that dances about us in perennial slavery--nothing more. The wood opens. Between the wayfarer and the city extends a broad stretch of lawn, and in the centre a large pond. Welcome, thou dale of verdure! Well-kept paths of gravel lead over the forest meadow; here and there a clump of waving undergrowth is seen, and beneath it a garden-bench. Here the well-to-do citizen sits of an afternoon, and resting his hands upon the bamboo-cane that he carries, looks proudly over upon the towers of his loved city. Is the meadow, too, transformed to-day? A swelling expanse of water seems to lie before the wayfarer; it seethes and bubbles and plays about his feet, in endless masses of mist, as far as the eye can reach. What army of hobgoblins do lave their garments here! They flutter from trees, they course through the air, faint in outline, now dissolving, now intermingling. Higher the dim, dark figures soar. They float above the wayfarer's head. The gloomy mass of forest disappears. The very vault of heaven itself is lost in the misty darkness, and every visible outline sinks in the chaos of paling light and floating shapelessness. The solid earth still stays beneath the feet of our traveler, and yet he moves on, separated from all actual earthly forms, amid glimmering bodiless shadows. Here and there, the floating illusions again gather. Slowly the phantoms of air sweep through the veil that encompasses our wayfarer. Now the bent figure of a woman in prayer presses forward, broken with sorrow; now a troop in long, waving robes appears, as of Roman Senators, with emperor, halo-encircled, at their head. But halo and head dissolve, and the huge shadow glides, headless and ghostly, by. Mist of a watery meadow, who hath so bewitched thee? Who else but that aged trickster of heaven, the moon, the mischief-maker moon.