returned at last.

Some things to be posted:

"The echo of her laughter is the second sunrise I awaken to each day, and at night I feel it is more than stars looking down on me."
-- Jerry Spinelli, Stargirl

Devastating.

Secondly, I'm reading the chronicles of Narnia. I believe I am on book 5, Voyage of the Dawn Treader, with The Silver Chair and The Last Battle yet to come. Today I read a deliciously poignant piece of the book. I shall share it with you hence:

(A character Eustace has been turned into a dragon...)

"...Just as I was going to put my feet into the water, I looked down and saw that they were all hard and rough and wrinkled and scaly just as they had been before. Oh, that's all right, said I, it only means I had another smaller suit on underneath the first one, and I'll have to get out of it too. So I scratched and tore again and this under skin peeled off beautifully and out I stepped and left it lying beside the other one and went down to the well for my bathe.

Well, exactly the same thing happened again...how ever many skins have I got to take off?...So I scratched away for the third time, and got off a third skin, just like the two others, and stepped out of it. But as soon as I looked at myself in the water, I knew it had been no good.

Then the lion said - but I don't know if it spoke - You will have to let me undress you. I was afraid of his claws...but I was pretty nearly desperate now. So I just lay flat down on my back to let him do it.

The very first tear he made was so deep that I thought it had gone right into my heart. And when he began pulling the skin off, it hurt worse than anything I've ever elt. The only thing that made me able to bear it was just the pleasure of feeling the stuff peel off.

...He peeled the beastly stuff right off...and there it was lying on the grass: only ever so much thicker, and darker, and more knobbly looking than the others had been. And there was I as smooth and soft as a peeled switch and smaller than I had been. Then he caught hold of me - I didn't like that much for I was very tender underneath now that I'd no skin on - and threw me into the water (a bubbling well in an enchanted garden). It smarted like anything but only for a moment. After that it became perfectly delicious and all the pain was gone from my arm.

After a bit the lion took me out and dressed me...in new clothes.

And then suddenly I was back here."

-- C.S. Lewis, Voyage of the Dawn Treader, Chronicles of Narnia.