“‘Behold,’ said I.  ’In the city which calls itself the world, the townsmen are casting up dice!  Is it possible we shall be stricken with woe, or immensely uplifted in joy because of the falling of a die?  Oh world too sordid to be opposed to us!  Oh world too poor to be used by us!  Is not the world’s place under our feet, for it is of earth and we of spirit?’

“But my friend was not with me.  He wavered as if intoxicated, and wished to return to the city.  ‘Oh glorious world,’ said he, and sighed himself towards the gates we had left.

“Then seeing the brightness of my face, which just then reflected a great brightness in the sky, and remembering that his pain was only a bridge into the new, he gained possession of himself and turned his eyes away from the town.

“’More than my old self and its weak flesh do I value the new young life that is to be,’ said he.  ’Though I am a man and a creature of pleasure, I am become as a woman that bears children.  For the time is coming when I shall give birth to one younger than myself, later than myself....’

“’Your old self will reappear more beautiful, new-souled, transfigured,’ I replied.

“Then my companion looked at me with eyes that were full both of yearning and of pain, and he said, ’Though I would fain stay with you, yet must I go apart.  For I have one battle yet to fight, and that I can only fight alone.  Farewell, dear friend, husband of the woman that is in me!’

“Then said I farewell and we embraced and parted, for I saw that it was meet for him to commune alone with God and gain strength to win his victory.

“The town lay in the west; he went into the north and I into the east.  Once more I was alone.”

“Come, let us devise new means of happiness,” said my companion.  “Let us wander up-stream to the silent cradle of the river.  For all day long I hear the river calling my name.”

And we journeyed a three days’ tramp into the mountains, following the silver river upward and upward to the pure fountain of its birth.  And on the way, moved by the glow of intercourse, I told my companion the story of Zenobia, and also that of the old pilgrim whom I met at New Athos.  It was strange to us that the peasants in the country should live and die so much more worthily than the educated folk who live in the towns.  God made the country, man made the town, and the devil made the country town, was not for us an idle platitude but a burning fact, though we agreed that man was often a much more evil creator than the devil, and that the great capitals of Europe and America were the worst places for Man’s heavenly spirit that Time had ever known.

Imagine our three days’ journeying, the joy of the lonely one who has found a companion, the sharing of happiness that is doubling it; the beauty to live in, the little daintinesses and prettinesses of Nature to point out; the morning, sun-decked and dewy, the wide happiness of noon, the shadows of the great rocks where we rested, and the flash of the green and silver river tumbling outside in the sunshine; quiescent evening and the old age of the day, sunset and the remembrance of the day’s glory, the pathos of looking back to the golden morning.