Around us in the short straw and dust stalked the farmer's fowls, cackling, with red-eyed glances askew at our intrusion. Ducks were quacking. Doves flew in with whir of wing. I thought I should boil over with delight. And presently a sheep-dog, ears down and tail between its legs, slid round the beam of the barn door. Half in, half out, it stood bristling, eyes fixed, head thrust out. My companion drew himself up and with a large stone in his hand, edged, stooping and stealthily--and very much, I must confess, like the picture of a Fuegian I have seen in a book--between the gaudy wheels of the wagon, and faced the low-growling beast. I watched him, enthralled. For a moment or two he and the sheep-dog confronted each other without stirring. Then with one sharp bark, the animal flung back its head, and with whitened eye, turned and disappeared.
"Oh, _bravissimo_!" said I, mocking up at Mr Anon from under my hood. "He was cowed, poor thing. _I_ would have made friends with him."
We sate on in the sweet, dusty scent of the stormy air. The hail turned to rain. The wind rose higher. I began to be uneasy. So heavily streamed the water out of the clouds that walking back by the way we had come would be utterly impossible for me. What's to be done now?--I thought to myself. Yet the liquid song of the rain, the gurgling sighs and trumpetings of the wind entranced me; and I turned softly to glance at my stranger. He sat, chin on large-boned hands, his lank hair plastered on his hollow temples by the rain, his eyes glassy in profile.
"I am glad of this," he muttered dreamily, as if in response to my scrutiny. "We are here."
A scatter of green leaf-sheaths from a hawthorn over against the barn was borne in by the wind.
"I am glad too," I answered, "because when you are at peace, so I can be; for that marvellous land you tell me of is very far away. Why, who----?" But he broke in so earnestly that I was compelled to listen, confiding in me some queer wisdom he had dug up out of his books--of how I might approach nearer and nearer to the brink between life and reality, and see all things as they are, in truth, in their very selves. All things visible are only a veil, he said. A veil that withdraws itself when the mind is empty of all thoughts and desires, and the heart at one with itself. That is divine happiness, he said. And he told me, too, out of his far-fetched learning, a secret about myself.