and I came on it around a dip in the hills

"In my garden," said he, "she'd have shining wings and eyes that could look to the future as well as to the past, and immortal Hope for a lover. It would be worth all the toil and the privation." "Nobody ever made up a Paradise," said the girl fretfully, "but what the Puritan in him set the road with sharp stones and bordered it with thorns and stings.... Look, Ban! Here's the moon come back to us.... And see what's laughing at us and our dreams." On the crest of a sand-billow sprawled a huge organ-cactus, brandishing its arms in gnomish derision of their presence. "How can one help but believe in foul spirits with that thing to prove their existence?" she said. "And, look! There's the good spirit in front of that shining cloud." She pointed to a yucca in full, creamy flower; a creature of unearthly purity in the glow of the moon, a dream-maiden beckoning at the gates of darkness to a world of hidden and ineffable beauty. "When I saw my first yucca in blossom," said Banneker, "it was just before sunrise after I had been riding all night, and I came on it around a dip in the hills, standing alone against a sky of pearl and silver. It made me think of a ghost, the ghost of a girl who had died too young to know womanhood, died while she was asleep and dreaming pale, soft dreams, never to be fulfilled." "That's the injustice of death," she answered. "To take one before one knows and has felt and been all that there is to know and feel and be." "Yet"--he turned a slow smile to her--"you were just now calling Experience bad names; a horrid hag, wasn't it?" "At least, she's life," retorted the girl. "Yes. She's life." "Ban, I want to go on. The whole universe is in motion. Why must we stand still?" They reembarked. The grip of the hurrying depths took them past crinkly water, lustrously bronze in the moonlight where the bank had given way, and presently delivered them, around the shoulder of a low, brush-crowned bluff, into the keeping of a swollen creek.