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aprons and kerchiefs and the coloured border at the top of the stocking, already somewhat assimilated to the present because of having come so far, but still mysterious visitants. Her mouth was full of them, and when he kissed it he never knew whether he loved this woman or whether a miracle was being worked upon him and Grigia was only part of a mission linking him ever more closely with his beloved in eternity. Once Grigia said outright: "Thou'rt thinking other things, I can tell by thy look", and when he tried to pretend it was not so, she said: "Ah, all that's but glozing." He asked her what that meant, but she would not explain, and he racked his brains over it for a long time before it occurred to him that she meant he was glossing something over. Or did she mean something still more mysterious?
    One may feel such things intensely or not. One may have principles, in which case it is all only an aesthetic joke that one accepts in passing. Or one has no principles, or perhaps they have slackened somewhat, as was the case with Homo when he set out on his journey, and then it may happen that these manifestations of an alien life take possession of whatever has become masterless. Yet they did not give him a new self, a self for sheer happiness become ambitious and earth-bound; they merely lodged, in irrelevantly lovely patches, within the airy outlines of his body. Something about it all made Homo sure that he was soon to die, only he did not yet know how or when. His old life had lost all strength; it was like a butterfly growing feebler as autumn draws on.
    Sometimes he talked to Grigia about this. She had a way of her own of asking about it: as respectful as if it were something entrusted to her, and quite without self-seeking. She seemed to regard it as quite in order that beyond the mountains there were people he loved more than her, whom he loved with his whole soul. And he did not feel this love growing less; it was growing stronger, being ever renewed. It did not grow dim, but the more deeply coloured it became, the more it lost any power to decide anything for him in reality or to prevent his doing anything. It was weightless and free of all earthly attachment in that strange and wonderful way known only to one who has had to reckon up with his life and who henceforth may wait only for death. However healthy he had been before, at this time something within him rose up and was straight, like a lame man who suddenly throws away his crutches and walks on his own.
    This became strongest of all when it came to hay-making time. The hay was already mown and dried and only had to be bound and fetched in, up from the mountain meadows. Homo watched it from the nearest height, which was like being high in a swing, flying free above it all. The girl—quite alone in the meadow, a polka-dotted doll under the enormous glass bell of the sky—was doing all sorts of things in her efforts to make a huge bundle. She knelt down in it, pulling the hay towards her with both arms. Very sensually she lay on her belly across the bale and reached underneath it. She turned over on her side and stretched out one arm as far as she could. She climbed up it on one knee, then on both. There was something of the dor-beetle about her, Homo thought—the scarab, of course. At last she thrust her whole body under the bale, now bound with a rope, and slowly raised it on high. The bundle was much bigger than the bright, slender little human animal that was carrying it —or was that not Grigia?
    When, in search of her, Homo walked along the long row of hay-stooks that the peasant women had set up on the level part of the hillside, they were resting. He could scarcely believe his eyes, for they were lying on their hillocks of hay like Michelangelo's statues in the Medici chapel in Florence, one arm raised to support the head, and the body reposing as in flowing water. And when they spoke with him and had to spit, they did so with much art: with three