strength and the weakness of the age had written themselves upon those pages, in the ebbing of inherited belief and the inflow of convictions born out of new insight into and new contact with the experiences of life.

The old man sat motionless, with his eyes fixed on the slow moving hands; he seemed to be numbering the brief moments of his unfinished career. The century which had spoken through him was ebbing to its last second, and as it sank silently into the gulf of years his own thought seemed to pause in its daring flight, his own voice to sink into silence. The age and its master had done their work, and now, in the dim light of a room over which the spirit of the one had brooded and in which the brain and hand of the other had wrought, they were about to separate. The delicate hands moved on without consciousness of the mighty life whose limits they were fast registering, the stars looked down from the eternity in which they shone unmindful of the change from era to era, the world of men was remote and unconscious; the old man was alone

with the sinking fire and the passing century. The minute hand moved on, the fire flashed up fitfully and sank down in ashes, there was a moment of hush, and then slowly and solemnly the chimes in the little clock rang twelve. Norton shivered as if a sudden chill had struck him, and peal on peal through the midnight air the bells rang in a new century.

In

The man who had worked as few men work, and yet had shown no sign of breaking, felt strangely old in a moment, and the carol of the bells, flinging across the hills their jubilant welcome of the new time, struck on his inner ear like a requiem for a past that was irrevocably gone. an instant life lost its familiar and homelike aspect, the impalpable presence of the new century rose like a vast empty house through which no human feet had walked, in which no human hearts had beat, over which no atmosphere of hope and love and dear old usage hung warm and genial. Norton had become a stranger; his citizenship had gone with the age which had conferred it; his friendships seemed dim and ghostly, like myths out of which the

currents of life had ebbed. With a sinking heart, groping like one suddenly become blind for some familiar thing, he turned and looked at the row of books behind him upon whose covers his name was stamped. In the receding world that was swiftly moving away from him they alone remained faithful.

My life is but a breath," he said, as his eye fell upon them; "but thought does not die, and here I have written my own immortality. Here is the record of all I have felt and thought and done. These books are myself; and though I perish I live again."

The old man's eye ran down the line, and recalled, as it fell upon volume after volume, how each had grown into being. Here were books of keen, open-eyed, and tireless observation, into which had gone years of unbroken study of external life, with such fruitful results as come to the man of trained faculty, of deep insight, and of heroic patience. Here were works of daring speculation that had traversed the whole realm of knowledge and struck luminous lines of order through many an

outlying darkness. Upon these volumes Norton's eye rested with peculiar delight; those which had gone before were only his careful reports of the world without him, these were the mighty lines into which he had put his meditations on the problems of the universe; these were the utterance of his ripest thought, the fruitage of his best hours, the outcome of his long training, his laborious studies, his whole thoughtful life. In these books he knew that the vanished century had written itself most deeply and truly. Here were the eloquent lines in which its very soul seemed to burn with self-revealing splendour; here were its affirmations and its negations; here was, in a word, the sum and substance of that individual thought, spirit, sentiment, which made it different from the centuries that went before and would forever keep it distinct and apart from the centuries that were to follow. At the end of the shelf was a thin volume, modest, unpretentious, almost trivial beside the greater works around it. The light of pride faded out of the old man's eyes when they rested upon this

little book, and a deep, unutterable pathos filled them with unshed tears.

There had

been one year of his prosperous life when the light of the sun was darkened and the beauty of the heavens overhung with clouds; one year when his habits of investigation had been cast aside; when thinking mocked him with its insufficiency and the search for truth seemed idle and

unreal; one year when the sorrows of his

own heart rolled like billows over the pursuits of his mind, over the aims of his career, and rose until they threatened the whole universe in which he lived. He ceased to observe, to speculate, and only felt. The training of the schools, the long discipline of his maturity, the gifts and acquisitions of which lifted him above his fellow, seemed to vanish out of his life and left him only human; he was one with the vast throng about him who were toiling, loving, suffering, and dying under all the manifold experiences of humanity. In that year there was much that was sacred and incommunicable, much that had receded into the silence of his deeper self; but months later, when the agony of