Filling her kettle with water from the running brook, she stirred into it the herbs, the berries, the lizard, the frog and the cricket.  This part of her work completed, she sat down upon a bed of moss, drew forth the sacred parchment and read its contents again and again.

“When the cauldron steams, dance about the fire and sing this song.  As the last words die away Matizan will leap from the flames and reveal to thee the future.”

Credulous child that she was, not the faintest shadow of a doubt floated across her mind.  She thrust the parchment back into her bosom, and as the water began to bubble, leaped to her feet, threw her arms above her head, sprang into the air, and went whirling away in graceful curves and bacchantean dances.

There were in these movements, as in every dance, mysterious and perhaps incomprehensible elements.

Who can tell whether they have their origin in the will of the dancer alone, or in some outside force?  The daisies in the meadow and the waves of the sea dance because they are agitated by the wind.  The little cork automaton upon the sounding board of a piano dances because it is agitated by the vibrations of the strings.  The little children in the alleys of a great city seem to be agitated in the same way by the hurdy-gurdy!

Perhaps the rhythmic beating of the feet upon the ground surcharges the body with electrical force, as by the touch of a magnet.  There is a mystery in the simplest phenomena of life.

Pepeeta, dancing upon the green moss beneath the great beech trees, seemed to be in the hands of some external power, and could scarcely have been distinguished from an automaton!  She had brought her tambourine, and holding it on high with her left hand or extending it far forward, she tapped it with her fingers or her knuckles, until all its brazen disks tingled and its little bells gave out a sweet and silvery tintinnabulation.

The dancer’s movements were alternately sinuous, undulatory and gliding.  At one moment her supple form, bending humbly toward the earth, resembled the stem of a lily over-weighted with its blossom; the next, a branch of a tree flung upward by a tempest; the next, a column of autumn leaves caught up by a miniature whirlwind and sent spinning along a winding path.

Her eyes glowed, her cheeks burned and her bosom heaved with excitement.  She seemed either to have caught from nature her own mood, or else to have communicated hers to it, for while she danced all else danced with her, the water in the brook, the squirrels in the tree-tops, the shadows on the moss, and the leaves on the branches.

Following the directions of the parchment, she continued to spin and flutter around the fire until the water in the kettle began to boil.  At the first ebullitions, she stood poised for an instant upon her toe, like the famous statue of Mercury, and so lightly that she seemed to be sustained by undiscoverable wings, or to float, like a bubble, of her own buoyancy.