his mouth is large but finely shaped; I think he smiles a little crookedly.  Anyway, his eyes are beautiful; they are set far apart, and are strangely expressive.  For the rest, he is more freckled than any one I ever saw, and his hair—­which is of no particular colour—­is rather long and thrown off the temples, save for one lock that continually falls forward.  You will think I am in love with the apparition, to judge by the way in which I dwell on his description; indeed, I am almost inclined to think so myself!

Well!  I stood and stared at him; his hat was off, an open book was in his hand, and he gazed at me as one not well awake, that has been roused from dreams; with something in his looks, too, of the startled animal that would run away and dare not.  There is no knowing how long we might have stood there staring at each other, but for a sudden gust of wind that whisked off my hat, whereupon the young man and I both started downhill in pursuit.  The wind was playful, and led us a fine dance; we were obliged to laugh.  When at last he caught and handed back to me my property, we were thoroughly exhausted and sat down at the foot of the hill on the mossy tree-roots.  I am sure we must have looked very silly, for we were so out of breath that we could not leave off laughing,—­my young man has the heartiest laugh I ever heard.  When we had somewhat recovered, I said: 

“I wonder why one always laughs when something blows away?”

“It is,” he replied, with mock gravity, “what people call a wise dispensation of Providence.  There is nothing between laughter and tears.”

It never entered my head to get up and go my way; his shyness, too, seemed vanished; we were quite at ease.

“Have you ever noticed,” asked he, “how many different kinds of moss there are in these woods?”—­and we began to count the varieties as we sat.  At last I looked up and saw that the heavens were blue.

“I’m going uphill again,” said I, “to see the sunset.  How quickly the sky has cleared!  It almost seems as if some invisible broom had made a clean sweep of the clouds.”  To which the young man answered: 

“It was a birch-broom.  I see the marks of it.”

We climbed the hill side by side; it did not seem at all strange at the time.  When we reached the summit, the sun was setting in fullest glory, and we were silent.  Suddenly he cried: 

“Let us be fire-worshippers!  There is more of God in that great light than in all the gospels of mankind.”

“What a queer, comforting thing,” said I, “to hear from a stranger in a wood.”

It struck me afterwards that perhaps I, too, had said a queer thing; but we seemed to understand each other.  Presently we sat down again, and he talked to me about the Parsees; he appears to know a great deal about them.

We narrowly escaped a second run downhill; again the wind seized my hat, but he nimbly caught it on the wing.