In A Moment They Surrounded And Crowded Round Me, And Sitting Still Among Them Looking From Radiant Face To Face I At Length Found My Speech And Exclaimed, "O How Beautiful!"

Then a girl pressed forward from among the others, and putting up her hand she placed it on my temple, the fingers resting on my forehead; and gazing with a strange earnestness in my eyes she said:

"Beautiful? - only that! Do you see nothing more?"

I answered, looking back into her eyes: "Yes - I think there is something more but I don't know what it is. Does it come from you - your eyes - your voice, all this that is passing in my mind?"

"What is passing in your mind?" she asked.

"I don't know. Thoughts - perhaps memories: hundreds, thousands - they come and go like lightning so that I can't arrest them - not even one!"

She laughed, and the laugh was like her eyes and her voice and the touch of her hand on my temples.

Was it sad or glad? I don't know, but it was the most beautiful sound I had ever heard, yet it seemed familiar and stirred me in the strangest way.

"Let me think," I said.

"Yes, think!" they all together cried laughingly; and then instantly when I cast my eyes down there was a perfect stillness as if they were all holding their breath and watching me.

That sudden strange stillness startled me: I lifted my eyes and they were gone - the radiant beautiful people who had surrounded and interrogated me, and with them their shining golden village, had all vanished.

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