pointing with their hands and talking and laughing excitedly as if my
arrival among them had been an event of great importance. 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