A SMILE OF mirth spread over the sky when you dressed my heart in rags and sent her forth into the road to beg. She went from door to door, and many a time when her bowl was nearly full she was robbed. At the end of the weary day she came to your palace gate holding up her pitiful bowl, and you came and took her hand and seated her beside you on your throne.
I PACED ALONE on the road across the field while the sunset was hiding its last gold like a miser. The daylight sank deeper and deeper into the darkness, and the widowed land, whose harvest had been reaped, lay silent. Suddenly a boy's shrill voice rose into the sky. He traversed the dark unseen, leaving the track of his song across the hush of the evening. His village home lay there at the end of the waste land, beyond the sugar-cane field, hidden among the shadows of the banana and the slender areca palm, the cocoa-nut and the dark green jack-fruit trees. I stopped for a moment in my lonely way under the starlight, and saw spread before me the darkened earth surrounding with her arms countless homes furnished with cradles and beds, mothers' hearts and evening lamps, and young lives glad with a gladness that knows nothing of its value for the world.