But it was a spectacle stranger still to observe how the elves, or, more properly speaking, "Manitous," were busying themselves about these shadows--now approaching them, now receding from them; sometimes standing beside them, earnestly gesticulating, as if engaged in conversation with the unseen, unheard personages who cast them. While watching these mysterious movements Sprigg became cognizant of another curious circumstance--the very counterpart of the shadow mystery. He perceived that, while those invisible mortals were shadowed forth with such distinctness, the Manitous themselves, with the light thrown full and strong upon them, were as shadowless in that light as air itself. Noting this, he glanced upward to see what manner of light it must be that could shadow forth the unseen, and shadowless leave the seen. How the boy started! Then backward shrank, till abruptly checked by a column, against whose base, as were he an effigy carved upon it, he stood, gazing coweringly upward. That globe of living light was a living _eye_! An eye immensely large, of calm and terrible look, which Sprigg felt to be bent directly upon himself, piercing his very soul and laying it open, stripped of all disguise. Though so bright that it illumined the vast temple to its uttermost bounds, that wondrous eye did not blind, nor even dazzle, the sight; for it imparted to the mortal eye, that need must meet it, strength to bear its light and behold the things it would reveal. To have been dazzled into blindness had been far more tolerable than to endure that terrible scrutiny. So felt the guilty young human thing as, with increasing awe and dread, he perceived that, while the eye was never turned from him, it seemed to be watchfully observant of all that was passing beneath it, however distant the objects, diverse, multitudinous. No secret, then; no guilty deed or thought, could be hidden in that light. The boy started! That lie he had sent back to his mother as he was slinking away from home! Did the eye see that? Aye, and the hundred others he had told, and was showing upon his soul a smutch, a smear, a spot for every one! Back, again, he shrank and hid himself behind the column. The column was far loftier and more massive than those which uphold the dome of mighty St. Peter's, and was hewn out from the eternal granite; yet the light of that terrible eye came gleaming through it, as if it had been of the clearest crystal. He ran to another, then to a third, fourth, fifth--tenth. In vain! Interpose what he might, still was it all as airy transparency between himself and that piercing glance. There are X-rays for the soul, as well as for the body. He turned his back upon it; there it was still! Look where he would--in the depths above--and the eye was ever before him, its calm and terrible look unchanged. Yet it did not seem to follow him. It was simply _there_! Everywhere!