“Do you remember in the old myth of Demeter and Persephone,” Kate asked me, “where Demeter takes care of the child and gives it ambrosia and hides it in fire, because she loves it and wishes to make it immortal, and to give it eternal youth; and then the mother finds it out and cries in terror to hinder her, and the goddess angrily throws the child down and rushes away?  And he had to share the common destiny of mankind, though he always had some wonderful inscrutable grace and wisdom, because a goddess had loved him and held him in her arms.  I always thought that part of the story beautiful where Demeter throws off her disguise and is no longer an old woman, and the great house is filled with brightness like lightning, and she rushes out through the halls with her yellow hair waving over her shoulders, and the people would give anything to bring her back again, and to undo their mistake.  I knew it almost all by heart once,” said Kate, “and I am always finding a new meaning in it.  I was just thinking that it may be that we all have given to us more or less of another nature, as the child had whom Demeter wished to make like the gods.  I believe old Captain Sands is right, and we have these instincts which defy all our wisdom and for which we never can frame any laws.  We may laugh at them, but we are always meeting them, and one cannot help knowing that it has been the same through all history.  They are powers which are imperfectly developed in this life, but one cannot help the thought that the mystery of this world may be the commonplace of the next.”

“I wonder,” said I, “why it is that one hears so much more of such things from simple country people.  They believe in dreams, and they have a kind of fetichism, and believe so heartily in supernatural causes.  I suppose nothing could shake Mrs. Patton’s faith in warnings.  There is no end of absurdity in it, and yet there is one side of such lives for which one cannot help having reverence; they live so much nearer to nature than people who are in cities, and there is a soberness about country people oftentimes that one cannot help noticing.  I wonder if they are unconsciously awed by the strength and purpose in the world about them, and the mysterious creative power which is at work with them on their familiar farms.  In their simple life they take their instincts for truths, and perhaps they are not always so far wrong as we imagine.  Because they are so instinctive and unreasoning they may have a more complete sympathy with Nature, and may hear her voices when wiser ears are deaf.  They have much in common, after all, with the plants which grow up out of the ground and the wild creatures which depend upon their instincts wholly.”