As I was meditating how, oysterlike, little villages reproduce themselves from generation to generation, a few coming and a few going but the majority leading a narrow simple round of existence. I came suddenly, so it seemed to me, upon one grave which gave me a real shock. It was a comparatively recent slab of gray granite with the modern plate of black glass set in it and a Gothic cross surmounting it all at the top. On the glass plate was lettered: Here Rests Theodor Dreiser, Born 16--Feb--1820. Died 28--Feb--1882. R. I. P. I think as clear a notion as I ever had of how my grave will look after I am gone and how utterly unimportant both life and death are, anyhow, came to me then. Something about this old graveyard, the suggestion of the new life of spring, a robin trilling its customary evening song on a near-by twig, the smoke curling upward from the chimneys in the old houses below, the spire of the medieval church and the walls of the medieval castle standing out in the softening light--one or all of them served to give me a sense of the long past that is back of every individual in the race of life and the long future that the race has before it, regardless of the individual. Religion offers no consolation to me. Psychic research and metaphysics, however meditated upon, are in vain. There is in my judgment no death; the universe is composed of life; but, nevertheless, I cannot see any continuous life for any individual. And it would be so unimportant if true. Imagine an eternity of life for a leaf, a fish-worm, an oyster! The best that can be said is that ideas of types survive somewhere in the creative consciousness. That is all. The rest is silence. Besides this, there were the graves of my father’s brother John, and some other Dreisers; but none of them dated earlier than 1800. CHAPTER XLV MY FATHER’S BIRTHPLACE It was quite dark when I finally came across a sort of tap-room “restaurant” whose quaint atmosphere charmed me. The usual pewter plates and tankards adorned the dull red and brown walls. A line of leather-covered seats followed the walls, in front of which were ranged long tables. My arrival here with a quiet request for food put a sort of panic into the breast of my small but stout host, who, when I came in, was playing checkers with another middle-aged Mayener, but who, when I asked for food, gave over his pleasure for the time being and bustled out to find his wife. He looked not a little like a fat sparrow. “Why, yes, yes,” he remarked briskly, “what will you have?” “What _can_ I have?” On the instant he put his little fat hand to his semi-bald pate and rubbed it ruminatively. “A steak, perhaps. Some veal? Some sausage?” “I will have a steak, if you don’t mind and a cup of black coffee.”