Page:The Campaner thal, and other writings.djvu/54

ess) stepped up to Nadine, and said: "It is a pity for the pain. You must take the wart-locust, I have proofs," do you understand? It is this. The so-called wart-eater, a locust with light brown spots, takes away a wart in a very short time by a single bite. Dame Berlier, over whom, as over most Southrons, beauty had greater power than self-love and sex, had falsely imagined that Nadine wished to annihilate the only fault in her charming form with the fly. The Chaplain had scarcely heard the wart-eater mentioned, when he vanished among the green, and commenced a hunt for wart-locusts. I was vexed that I had known the remedy as well as Dame Berlier, and never thought of it. For a shabby simile I should have easily recollected it, but not for a useful cure. Fortune permitted him soon to return with the winged wart-operator; this excited my envy. When he gave it to Nadine, the officious Phylax had squeezed, with the letter and paper press of his hands, like in a good calendar-press, the brown spotted vegetable-eater to—death. The animal could bite no more; I immediately darted off in search of another, and soon returned, holding one by the tips of its wings, and said, I would myself hold it over the wart until he would operate on it. While performing the action I praised it. Every great deed, I said, is only accomplished in the soul, at the moment of determination; when it comes outward and is repeated by the body,—which holds the locust,—it disperses into insignificant movements and thirds; but when it is done, as now the operation, it becomes great again, and, ever increasing, flows onward through all time. Thus the Rhine rushes like a giant from its summit, disperses in the fog, falls as rain upon the plain, then it forms itself into clouds, and roams over the sands, and carries suns instead of rainbows.