Alas! the cheapness was illusory. The dépôt with its crowd had been wiped out as by the offended Fury of the mountain; though by another freakish incident, illustrating the Titanic forces at work, yet the one redeeming detail of the appalling catastrophe, a small train of three carriages that had just moved off was lifted up bodily by the terrible wind that raced ahead of the monstrous sliding snowball, and was clapped down in a field out of its reach, as if by a protecting hand. Not a creature on it was injured. I had passed the years allotted to man by the Psalmist, and my memory of the things of yesterday had begun to be faint and elusive, but the images of my Zloczszol adventure returned with a vividness that grew daily more possessive. What had become of Bethulah? Was she alive? Was she dead? And which were the sadder alternative--to have felt the darkness of early death closing round the great hope, or to have survived its possibility, and old, bent, bitter, and deserted by her followers, to await the lesser disenchantment of the grave? An irresistible instinct impelled me--aged as I was myself--to revisit alone these scenes of my youth, to see how fate had rounded or broken off its grim ironic story. I pass over the stages of the journey, at the conclusion of which I found myself again in the mountain village. Alas! The changes on the route had prepared me for the change in Zloczszol. Railroads threw their bridges over the gorges I had climbed, telegraph poles tamed the erst savage forest ways. And Zloczszol itself had now, by the line passing through it, expanded into a trading centre, with vitality enough to recuperate quickly from the avalanche. The hotel was clean and commodious, but I could better have endured that ancient sitting-room in which the squalling baby was rocked. Strange, I could see its red wrinkled face, catch the very timbre of its piping cries! Only the mountain was unchanged, and the pines and firs that had whispered dreams to my youth whispered sleep to my age. Ah, how frail and futile is the life of man! He passes like a shadow, and the green sunlit earth he trod on closes over him and takes the tread of the new generations. What had I to say to these new, smart people in Zloczszol? No, the dead were my gossips and neighbours. For me more than the avalanche had desolated Zloczszol. I repaired to the cemetery. There I should find Yarchi. It was no use looking for him under the porch of the pine cottage. And there, too, I should in all likelihood find Bethulah!