When I called to mind that on hearing the outcome of my story they all had said—Strange!—I for my part exclaimed to myself—Natural!
WITHERED LEAVES
THE sun had set. The wheeling masses of cloud were hastening to heap themselves one above another in the distant horizon. The cold wind of autumn evenings was whirling the withered leaves about my feet.
I was sitting by the side of a road [the road to the cemetery] where ever there return fewer than those who go.
I do not know of what I was thinking, if, indeed, I was just then thinking of anything at all. My soul was trembling on the point of soaring into space, as the bird trembles and flutters its wings before taking flight.
There are moments in which, thanks to a series of abstractions, the spirit withdraws from its environment and, self-absorbed, analyzes and comprehends the mysterious phenomena of the inner life of man.
There are other moments in which the soul slips free from the flesh, loses its personality, mingles with the elements of nature, relates itself to their mode of being and translates their incomprehensible language.
In one of these latter moments was I, when, alone and in the midst of a clear tract of level ground, I heard talking near me.
The speakers were two withered leaves, and this, a little more or less exact, was their strange dialogue:
“Whence comest thou, sister?”