wonder to sleep. Even as a child, however, something of what it meant
had pierced her awe and wonder. Once as she crossed a broken, bare
mountain of Roumania she had seen a wild ass perched upon a high summit
gazing, as it were, over the wide valley, where beneath, among the rocks,
other wild asses wandered. There was something so statue-like in this
immovable wild creature that Fleda had watched it till it was hid from
her view by a jutting rock. But the thing which made a lasting
impression, drawing her nearer to nature-life than all that had chanced
since she was born, was the fact that on returning, hours after, the wild
ass was still standing upon the summit of the hill, still gazing across
the valley. Or was it gazing across the valley? Was there some other
vision commanding its sight?

So a young wife not yet a mother loses herself for hours together in a
vista of unexplored experience. Fleda had passed on, out of sight of the
wild ass on the hills, but for ever after the memory of it remained with
her and the picture of it sprang to her eye innumerable times. The
hypnotized wild thing--hypnotized by its own vague instincts, or by
something outside itself-became to her as the Sphinx to the Egyptian, the
everlasting question of existence.

Now, as she watched the day fleeing, and night with swift stealthiness
coming on, that unforgettable picture of the Roumanian hills came to her
again. The instinct of those far-off days which had been little removed
from the finest animal intelligence had now developed into thought.
Brain and soul strove to grasp what it all meant, and what the revelation
was between Nature and herself. Nature was so vast; she was so
insignificant; changes in its motionless inorganic life were
imperceptible save through the telescopes of years; but she, like the
wind, the water, and the clouds, was variable, inconstant. Was there any