He had chosen the quietest and remotest spots.

He had been on the tops of mountains whose heads were in the clouds and had looked down on other mountains when the sun rose and touched them with such light as made it seem as if the world were just being born.
But the light had never seemed to touch himself until one day when he realized that for the first time in ten years a strange thing had happened.

He was in a wonderful valley in the Austrian Tyrol and he had been walking alone through such beauty as might have lifted any man's soul out of shadow.

He had walked a long way and it had not lifted his.
But at last he had felt tired and had thrown himself down to rest on a carpet of moss by a stream.

It was a clear little stream which ran quite merrily along on its narrow way through the luscious damp greenness.
Sometimes it made a sound rather like very low laughter as it bubbled over and round stones.