That slow walk home beneath the canopy the painted maples made marked the ending of another day in the old professor's fading life; a day such as days had been for twenty years, a space of time in which a smile had flitted to his lips, a tear had risen, and he had held the book a little closer to his eyes. It was not long thereafter that we learned the end had come. They found him in his chair, a book upon his knee, his slim forefinger marking the page where he had left off reading to close his eyes and dream. The pale ghost of a smile still lingered about his mouth. Some one, gentler than the rest, placed a single rose in the cold hand, and a scant company followed the slow hearse to the cemetery. No one wept. Perhaps no one even felt a sadness, standing there beside the open grave. Yet he would not have wished it otherwise. They covered him for the long, long sleep, and went away. And now, on a day in June, when the air is heavy with the fragrance of the green and growing things and the grasses are alive with singing creatures, the breeze that stirs alike the tall tree-tops and the tender shoots of grain seems to whisper above the lonely grave, unmarked in that great City of the Dead: "Sleep on; thy work is done; done well. Thou shalt be rewarded." End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Ann Arbor Tales, by Karl Edwin Harriman