exalted and transported.  The fitful fever cooled in her veins.  She absorbed and drew into her own spirit the calm and silence of the place, and she was in turn absorbed and drawn into the majestic life around her.  The distinctively human seemed to slip from her like a garment, and she was transformed into a creature of these solitudes.  Her movements resembled those of a fawn.  Her great, gazelle-like eyes peered hither and thither, as if ever upon the watch for some hidden foe.  It was as if her life in the habitations of men had been an enforced exile, and she had now returned to her native haunts.

As she penetrated more and more deeply into the wood, her confidence increased; she stepped more firmly, removed her hat, shook out her long black tresses, listened to the songs of birds piping in the tops of trees, and exulted in the consciousness of freedom and of kinship with these natural objects.  With a sudden and impulsive movement, she drew near to the smooth trunk of a great beech, put her arms around it, laid her cheek against it and kissed the bark.  She was prompted by the same instinct which made St. Francis de Assisi call the flowers “our little sisters,—­” an inexplicable sense of companionship and fraternity with living things of every kind.

Her swift footsteps brought her at last to the summit of a low line of hills, and she glided down into an unpeopled and shadow-haunted valley through which ran a crystal stream.  Perceiving the fitness of the place for her purpose, she hastened forward smiling, and, heated with her journey, threw herself down by the side of the brook and plunged her face into its cool and sparkling waters.  Then she lifted her head and carried the water to her lips in the palm of her dainty hand, and as she drank beheld the image of her face on the surface of a quiet little pool.  Small wonder that she stooped to kiss the red lips which were mirrored there!  So did the fair Greek maidens discover and pay tribute to their own loveliness, in the pure springs of Hellas.

Refreshed by the cooling draught, the priestess now addressed herself to her task.  Gazing for an instant around the majestic temple in which her act of worship was to be performed, she began like some child of a long gone age to rear an altar.  Selecting a few from the many boulders that were strewn along the edge of the stream, she arranged them so as to make an elevated platform upon which she heaped dry leaves, brushwood and dead branches.  Over it she suspended a tripod of sticks, and from this hung her iron kettle.  Drawing from her pocket flint and steel, she struck them together, dropped a spark upon a piece of rotten wood, purred out her pretty cheeks and blew it into a flame.  As the fire caught in the dry brushwood and began to leap heavenward, she followed it with her great brown eyes until it vanished into space.  Her spirit thrilled with that same sense of awe and reverence which filled the souls of primitive men when they traced the course of the darting flames toward the sky.  In the presence of fire, some form of worship is inevitable.  Before conflagrations our reveries are transformed into prayers.  The silently ascending tongues of flame carry us involuntarily into the presence of the Infinite.