From the bed of suffering she had not left for thirty years she
helped the world go round more sweetly and more easily, though few
divined those sudden moments of beauty they caught flashing from her
halting words, nor guessed their source of strength.
'Of course,' thought Jimbo, laughing, 'I see now why I like to go and
tell her everything. She understands all before I've said it. She's
simply stuffed with starlight--bursting with inside-sight.'
'That's sympathy,' his cousin added, hearing the vivid thought. And he
worked away like an entire ant-heap. But he was growing rather
breathless now. 'There's too much for me,' he laughed as though his
mouth were full. 'I can't manage it all!' He was wading to the waist,
and his coat and trousers streamed with runnels of orange-coloured
light.
'Swallow it then!' cried Monkey, her hair so soaked that she kept
squeezing it like a sponge, both eyes dripping too.
It was their first real experience of the joy of helping others, and
they hardly knew where to begin or end. They romped and played in the
stuff like children in sand or snow--diving, smothering themselves,
plunging, choking, turning somersaults, upsetting each other's
carefully reared loads, and leaping over little pyramids of gold.
Then, in a flash, their laughter turned the destroyed heaps into
wonderful new patterns again; and once more they turned sober and
began to work.
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