cheerfully to me, and I thanked—not God, for I had been taught no God—I thanked the bright human summer, and the joyful human sun in the sky; I thanked the human summer and the sun, that they had given me the woman; and I would sometimes steal away into the beautiful grass, and worship the kind summer and the sun; and often say over to myself the soft words, summer and the sun.
'Still, weeks and years ran on, and my hair began to veil me with its fulness and its length; and now often I heard the word beautiful, spoken of my hair, and beautiful, spoken of myself. They would not say the word openly to me, but I would by chance overhear them whispering it. The word joyed me with the human feeling of it. They were wrong not to say it openly to me; my joy would have been so much the more assured for the openness of their saying beautiful, to me; and I know it would have filled me with all conceivable kindness toward every one. Now I had heard the word beautiful, whispered, now and then, for some months, when a new being came to the house; they called him gentleman. His face was wonderful to me. Something strangely like it, and yet again unlike it, I had seen before, but where, I could not tell. But one day, looking into the smooth water behind the house, there I saw the likeness—something strangely like, and yet unlike, the likeness of his face. This filled me with puzzlings. The new being, the gentleman, he was very gracious to me; he seemed astonished, confounded at me; he looked at me, then at a very little, round picture—so it seemed—which he took from his pocket, and yet concealed from me. Then he kissed me, and looked with tenderness and grief upon me; and I felt a tear fall on me from him. Then he whispered a word into my ear. "Father," was the word he whispered; the same word by which the young girls
