I was much surprised, then, after I had been admitted to the full confidence of my proparents, to hear them refer with pleasure, if not joy, to what seemed nothing but a glorification of the past. The name Fialume came repeatedly into their conversations with each other till at last it roused my curiosity. There was something imaginative in the ideas connected with it; it never rose to their lips without bringing into their eyes a beautifully piteous expression that bordered almost on the ecstasy of joy. They saw that they had piqued my curiosity; and before I had asked them they gave me the information I desired. The word, Fialume, translated, meant “the valley of memories.” It was the great library and university of the island. There the second stage of education was largely passed. If by the age of fifty all superstitious veneration of the past had been eradicated from the nature of the new citizen, he was led to this valley day after day, month after month, until he had seen the career of the race, and had grown familiar with the steps of its development; he learned to shudder at the darkness out of which it had come, and to watch with joy the growing light and the fleeing shadows as it neared the present. Thus did he learn true gratitude for what he was, and true reverence for the future towards which they were all striving. I was not yet fit to enter the precincts of the valley. I had still too much of that anguished yet exquisite homesickness for my own past to be trusted with insight into a past that might seem great to me. And yet my probation would be shorter, as my buried world was so different from theirs; there would be less danger of superstitious reverence awaking in me for any of their old stages or antiquated institutions, and no danger of Ayala stirring my idolatrous devotion. This new word puzzled me, they saw. And they explained that it was but the older name for the same valley; it meant “the resting-place of the untrammelled.” In fact, their great library and university was their graveyard too. Years passed in happy renovation of my whole being, body and soul. As I looked back I began to shudder at the past out of which I had come, its low ideals, and its still lower planes of living; it seemed centuries behind me and not mere years; it had grown into a murky cloud on the far horizon. I could see how often I had been on the verge of despair or disease and began to know the blindness and ignorance that had been almost the air I breathed. I shrank in horror from all I had been; for I could examine the poor fabric of it almost microscopically now. There was little fear indeed of my ever longing for what I had left behind me.