Читать книгу The Complete Works of Algernon Blackwood. Novels, Short Stories, Horror Classics, Occult & Supernatural Tales, Plays онлайн

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'Yes, on the whole,' he muttered at length in-consequently, 'I think I may consider myself softer than before—kinder, gender, more alive!' But neither Nixie, nor Pouf, nor, for that matter, Sambo and Zezette either, paid the smallest attention to his remark; he was soon lost again in further reflections.

It was the child's voice that presently recalled him.

'Uncle Paul,' she said very softly, her mind still busy with thoughts of her own, 'do you know that sometimes I have heard the earth breathing too—akchilly breathing?'

Paul, coming back from a long journey, turned and gazed at the eager little face beside him in silence.

'The earth is alive, I'm sure,' she went on with an air of great mystery. 'It breathes and whispers,: and even purrs; sometimes it cries. It's a great body, alive—just like you and the other stars.'

'Nixie!'

'They are all bodies, though; heavenly bodies, Daddy called them. Only we, I suppose, are too small to see it that way perhaps.'

Paul listened, stroking Pouf slowly. The child's voice was low and somewhat breathless with the excitement of what she was saying. She believed every word of it intensely. Only a very small part of what she was thinking found expression in her words. Her ideas beckoned her beyond; and mere words could not overtake them at her age.