The Poet took the child in his arms and kissed her. An angel touched his heart, and he now felt that he could forgive his bitterest enemies.
"I will tell you a story, my child," he said, in his usually mild voice.
The child leaned her head against his breast, and listened.
"Once upon a time," he began, "there was a man who dwelt in a great, wide wilderness. He was a poor man, and worked very hard for his bread. He lived in a cave of a rock, and because the sun shone burning hot into the cave, he twined roses and jessamines and honeysuckles all around it; and in front of it, and on the ledges of the rock, he planted ferns and sweet shrubs, and made it very pleasant. Water ran gurgling from a fissure in the rock into a little basin, whence it poured in gentle streams through the garden, in which grew all kinds of delicious fruits. Birds sang in the tall trees which Nature herself had planted; and little squirrels, and lovely green lizards, with bright, intelligent eyes, lived in the branches and among the flowers.
"All would have gone well with the man, had not evil spirits taken possession of his cave. They troubled him night and day. They dropped canker-blight upon his roses, nipped off his jasmine and honeysuckle-flowers, and, in the form of caterpillars and blight, ate his beautiful fruits.
"It made the man angry and bitter in his feelings. The flowers were no longer beautiful to him, and when he looked on them he thought only of the canker and the caterpillar.
"'I can no longer take pleasure in them,' he said; 'I will leave the cave, and go elsewhere.'
"He did so; and travelled on and on, a long way. But it was a vast wilderness in which he dwelt, and thus it was many and many a weary day before he came to a place of rest; nor did he know that all this time the evil spirits who had plagued him so in his own cave were still going with him.
"But so they were. And they made every place he came to seem worse than the last. Their very breath cast a blight upon everything.
"He was footsore and weary, and very miserable. A feeling like despair was in his heart, and he said that he might as well die as live. He lay down in the wilderness, so unhappy was he, and scarcely had he done so, when he heard behind him the pleasantest sound in the world,—a little child singing like a bird, because her heart was innocent and full of joy; and the next moment she was at his side.