This people, I soon found, had overcome the ancient abhorrence of death. For they identified their life and personality with the higher of their energies, and not with the lower and bodily forms. They shrank, it is true, from all that would lead to the divorce of the yoked energies of any animate being before its due time; not so much because they thought this an evil for the victim as because the perpetration would implant in the doer a germ of retrogression. To be cruel, to shed blood, was the beginning of degradation of the soul; it was one of the acts that allowed the lower to take command of the higher in their system. But for a Limanoran himself to approach death became, whenever he saw it to be inevitable, the keenest joy, in spite of the farewells it entailed. He knew that thereafter, should he make effort to live, he would only clog the wheels of progress, he would only be a burden on the race instead of its helper. Amiralno never showed the slightest sign of shrinking from the dissolution of his life-bonds. He was sad to leave his lifelong mate, with whom he had done so much for the race; but he knew that she would soon follow him; it was a matter of but a few days or months; her thought-energy would mingle and commune with his again, freed from the material trammels that checked and dulled their intercourse in their terrene life; upwards through the ether their souls would climb, ever becoming purer and swifter in their flight. But, as I went about my duties, my thoughts would break away to the coming death-scene and sadness would cloud them. I remembered the last farewells of my buried life, and most of all the watch over the fading light in my mother’s eyes. Nothing could burn out of my memory the bitterness of at last facing the inevitable. Slowly had I been led by the physician to realise that nothing could save her, and still I hoped against hope, checking my tears lest she should see them and conjecture my alarm. Only when the lips became silent and pale did I at last admit the thought that this was death. How could I stifle my grief longer? Were we not all to each other, this mother, who had clung to me and nursed me through sorrows and misfortunes, I her only child, who had refused to leave her for the seductions of great place and fortune? She was vanishing for ever from me, and nothing I could do would bring her back. I was caught and crushed by the iron hand of fate and stood in stony silence, paralysed by my grief and my impotence. There was too much of the man and the stoic in my young blood to cry out; but if only I could give up my own life to bring hers back! In one of her final waking dreams she prattled and wept over me as if I were a child again, saved once more from the clutching breakers. Raising herself with a wild cry from her pillow, she held me in her arms with fierce love; only for a moment; then the cords that bound her life brake; the memory had torn her heart. There she lay, all that I cared for