sky, or even the flickering tints of the green creeper on the wall with its crimson cornucopias filled with hot sunshine.  She liked clear, vital colors, this girl,—­the crimsons and blues.  They answered her, somehow.  They could speak.  There were things in the world that like herself were marred,—­did not understand,—­were hungry to know:  the gray sky, the mud swamps, the tawny lichens.  She cried sometimes, looking at them, hardly knowing why:  she could not help it, with a vague sense of loss.  It seemed at those times so dreary for them to be alive,—­or for her.  Other things her eyes were quicker to see than ours:  delicate or grand lines, which she perpetually sought for unconsciously,—­in the homeliest things, the very soft curling of the woollen yarn in her fingers, as in the eternal sculpture of the mountains.  Was it the disease of her injured brain that made all things alive to her,—­that made her watch, in her ignorant way, the grave hills, the flashing, victorious rivers, look pitifully into the face of some dingy mushroom trodden in the mud before it scarce had lived, just as we should look into human faces to know what they would say to us?  Was it the weakness and ignorance that made everything she saw or touched nearer, more human to her than to you or me?  She never got used to living as other people do; these sights and sounds did not come to her common, hackneyed.  Why, sometimes, out in the hills, in the torrid quiet of summer noons, she had knelt by the shaded pools, and buried her hands in the great slumberous beds of water-lilies, her blood curdling in a feverish languor, a passioned trance, from which she roused herself, weak and tired.

She had no self-poised artist sense, this Lois,—­knew nothing of Nature’s laws.  Yet sometimes, watching the dun sea of the prairie rise and fall in the crimson light of early morning, or, in the farms, breathing the blue air trembling up to heaven exultant with the life of bird and forest, she forgot the poor coarse thing she was, some coarse weight fell off, and something within, not the sickly Lois of the town, went out, free, like an exile dreaming of home.

You tell me, that, doubtless, in the wreck of the creature’s brain, there were fragments of some artistic insight that made her thus rise above the level of her daily life, drunk with the mere beauty of form and color.  I do not know,—­not knowing how sham or real a thing you mean by artistic insight.  But I do know that the clear light I told you of shone for this girl dimly through this beauty of form and color; and ignorant, with no words for her thoughts, she believed in it as the Highest that she knew.  I think it came to her thus an imperfect language, (not an outward show of tints and lines, as to some artists,)—­a language, the same that Moses heard when he stood alone, with nothing between his naked soul and God, but the desert and the mountain and the bush that burned with fire.  I think the weak soul of the girl staggered from its