I might, in the proudly modest spirit of the old sculptors, have inscribed on the vase the words: Abel was doing this.

For was not my ideal beautiful like theirs, and the best that my art could do only an imperfect copy--a rude sketch?
A serpent was represented wound round the lower portion of the jar, dull-hued, with a chain of irregular black spots or blotches extending along its body; and if any person had curiously examined these spots he would have discovered that every other one was a rudely shaped letter, and that the letters, by being properly divided, made the following words: Sin vos y siu dios y mi.
Words that to some might seem wild, even insane in their extravagance, sung by some ancient forgotten poet; or possibly the motto of some love-sick knight-errant, whose passion was consumed to ashes long centuries ago.

But not wild nor insane to me, dwelling alone on a vast stony plain in everlasting twilight, where there was no motion, nor any sound; but all things, even trees, ferns, and grasses, were stone.
And in that place I had sat for many a thousand years, drawn up and motionless, with stony fingers clasped round my legs, and forehead resting on my knees; and there would I sit, unmoving, immovable, for many a thousand years to come--I, no longer I, in a universe where she was not, and God was not.
The days went by, and to others grouped themselves into weeks and months; to me they were only days--not Saturday, Sunday, Monday, but nameless.

They were so many and their sum so great that all my previous life, all the years I had existed before this solitary time, now looked like a small island immeasurably far away, scarcely discernible, in the midst of that endless desolate waste of nameless days.
My stock of provisions had been so long consumed that I had forgotten the flavour of pulse and maize and pumpkins and purple and sweet potatoes.

For Nuflo's cultivated patch had been destroyed by the savages--not a stem, not a root had they left: and I, like the sorrowful man that broods on his sorrow and the artist who thinks only of his art, had been improvident and had consumed the seed without putting a portion into the ground.