What shall teach him how ill are
His kisses forsooth
That yet rob without ruth
The first hopes of our youth?
And the snail sliding off in
The rain, leaves the stain
Of dishonour upon us,
And the worm from his coffin
Again and again,
Crawling forth has undone us.

Thee we hail O Deliverer with lips of delight.
There's a wrong in the world that is hard to set right.
Yet O waited and welcorm'd! thy footsteps among us,
Were foretold in the songsthat our forefathers sung us.

And, true one and tender,
We trust thee with tears,
Who anew now, shall render
Release to our fears.
Come to us, renew us
And solace the years
With new life, love endears!

The singers then told me that they were
Anthesphore, or flower-elves. That their race was
in endless feud with all the clans of the earth-worms,
who waged war upon them without cessation,
and inflicted upon them the most cruel
injuries. That hitherto it had been found impossible
to bring about any reconcilement between
the two hostile races, as their respective rights
were very undefined, the original record of those
rights being quite out of reach, and so concealed
in the remotest archives of the universe that it
could not be consulted. But that an ancient
tradition existed amongst the Anthesphore that
in the course of time a Deliverer should appear,
who should elucidate the laws that had so long
been in dispute, and mitigate the sufferings of
this afflicted race. The expected Deliverer was
to descend amongst them, in a certain place, and
upon a certain day, and should be known by
certain signs which they had at once recognised
as having been fulfilled in my advent. When I
protested that I knew nothing of their laws and
was quite unable to assist them, they became
very mysterious, and replied that this also had
been predicted; but that I was to seek out the
Wise One, who lives alone, and knows all things,
and he would instruct me how to act. When I
asked for further information about this
mysterious being, they declared they knew nothing
more than that I was to search the land till I
found a flowing water, and that if I followed the
flowing of this water, it would bring me to a
rock with a deep cavern where I should find the
Wise One. Then they began to sing:
The wave in its flowing
Shall find out the stone
Where sitteth, all knowing,
The Wise One alone.

And to every question that I asked they only
repeated this song; so that at last the sound of
it seemed to abide in my head, and when they
stopped singing, I still heard the words—
The wave in its flowing
Shall find out the stone.

I promised the Anthesphore that I would
endeavour to find out the Wise One. After long
search I discovered a water issuing from a rock
and flowing into a narrow channel of the stone.
The little waves, leaping fast upon each other,
seemed to be singing as they hurried along:
We seek ever flowing
Thoro' bramble and stone,
The Wise, the all-knowing,
That dwelleth alone.

I followed them as fast as I could across the
stony ridges under which they ran. At last the
water leaped abruptly down a chasm, and
disappeared under the earth. It did not seem
possible to follow the stream any longer. All
further progress was barred by the mighty rock
under which the water fell headlong out of sight.
I looked up in despair, and on the summit of
the rock I beheld . . . . . Doctor Lacerta—the
oldest living lizard, and therefore the wisest,
in this part of the world. The wisdom of the
lizards cannot be measured, nor even conceived
of by men, whose origin is of infinitely later
date in creation. The lizard tribe were the first
possessors of this world. Many varieties of that
extraordinary race have long since become
extinct; indeed, had they been permitted to endure,
the world could not possibly have contained so
much knowledge. But the race itself still
exists, diminished in size, but retaining full
possession of many of the most remarkable of its
early faculties. The reason of the immense
science possessed by the lizards is in the fact that
these creatures are gifted by nature with so fine
and susceptible an integument, that their
inmost thought and most transient sensations are
instantaneously, and by no conscious effort,
imprinted in legible characters upon the surface of
their tails. When these tails are completely
filled with the mystic writing which they are
framed to contain, they drop off, and are replaced
by new ones; each tail being, in this way, a
complete chapter of lizard biography. The cast
tails are carefully collected by their possessors,
and arranged with scrupulous order, in vast
libraries under the earth, or in the caverns of the
rocks, where they are preserved from accident,
and handed down as the most precious heirlooms
from generation to generation. By this means, no
lizard knowledge is ever lost. What each lizard
perceives, feels, or thinks, the sun imprints upon
his epidermis in distinct characters of different
kind, each character, according to its formation,
belonging to the language either of thought,
sensation, or perception. And in the library of
Lacerta you may read the remotest history of
times and events unknown to man, clearly
written in this threefold tongue. The Doctor
received me with all the courtesy of a superior
nature. He gave me much interesting information
about the Anthesphore. It is the innate
instinct of these little spirits, and the sole object
of all their efforts, as well as the crowning
promise of their ultimate destiny, to put forth
wings. The consciousness of a faculty to achieve
this end is born with the flower-elf in the darkness
under the earth. There, in the close blind