He was ragged and unkempt; he was almost as frail as a phantom; his skin was coloured a deep brown by exposure to the weather; his hair, thick and matted, came down to his shoulders, and his large and bright eyes seemed to envelop the whole of his face. By the time the spring came round again, and the cycle of the seasons had completed itself, he found his feet again upon the yellow shores of the loud-sounding sea. Yet now he did not linger within its magical thrall. For a long dormant passion had again begun to stir within him, and he knew that the hour was near when he must return to the aged man, his father, and to the little room. Through the brakes of the green woods through which he passed the notes of each bird as it sang were as familiar in his ears as the many and subtle voices of the wind. He could now read the face of the fruitful Earth, his mother, like an open page. All her sweet little mysteries he could decipher; he knew the shapes of her trees, the odours of her flowers, the habits and tracks of all her nimble wild creatures. Yet in his veins the passion was ever rising; he felt it was no longer meet for him to tarry. No more did it beseem him to while away the glad hours with this old gossip. Ere the winter came again he must return to the streets of the great city, and thence to the sanctuary in which he was wont to kneel; and to the white-haired man, his father; and to that other faithful friend who loved him tenderly. In the gorgeous heat of the midsummer he found himself again upon the mountains of the west. But now the passion was mounting hourly in the veins of the wayfarer, and soon he was to know that it had claimed as its fuel a portion of his vital power. His frame had never been so dauntless and so full of a divine vigour; his brain was like a crystal; but he seemed to know that his power of sight was not what it was. Upon these heights of the west he brought his power of vision to the proof. He found himself again in those altitudes, which previously he had trod when the hues of autumn were upon them. At that time he was able to discern clearly the adjacent peaks by which they were surrounded; yet on this day of midsummer, although the bright sky was like a mirror of opals, he knew not even their outlines. And he seemed to divine, by a clear foreknowledge, that all about him would soon be dark. Without hurry, and without fear, although the passion was ever mounting in his veins, the wayfarer turned his eyes to the east, towards the little sanctuary within the heart of the streets of the great city. Mile by mile he retraced the well-remembered steps. Although he could not now discern all that lay about him, as when a twelvemonth since he trod these ways, for his eyes were no longer faithful to him; yet, as his unfaltering limbs overcame the brakes and the thickets, the downs and the pastures, the new and puissant sense of kinship with the Earth, his mother, endued his veins with the strength of heroes.