The old heart forgot about life, full of cares and wrongs. The old bell-ringer forgot that life for him had become a thing shut up in a melancholy and crowded tower; he forgot that he was alone in the world--like an old stump, weather-beaten and broken.... He intercepted these singing and weeping sounds, fleeting higher towards the skies and falling again to the poor earth, and it seemed to him that he was surrounded by his sons and his grandsons; that these joyous voices, of old and young, had flowed together into one great chorus, and that they sang to him of happiness and joyousness, which he had not tasted in his life.... And the old man continued to tug at the ropes, while tears ran down his face, and his heart beat tremulously with the illusion of happiness. * * * * * And below the people were listening and saying to each other that never had old Mikheyich rung so marvellously. Then all of a sudden the large bell trembled violently and grew silent.... The smaller ones, as if confused, rang an unfinished tone; and then too stopped, as if to drink in the prolonged, sadly droning note, which trembled and flowed and wept, gradually dying away in the air.... The old bell-ringer fell back exhausted on the bench, and his last two tears trickled silently down his pale face. * * * * * “Quick! Send a substitute! The old bell-ringer has rung his last stroke.” GARSHIN THE MELANCHOLIAC “There is still something around us and within that baffles and surprises us. Events happen which are as mysterious after our glib explanations as they were before. Changes for good or ill take place in the heart of man for which his intellect gives no reason.” These words of Dr. Henry Van Dyke, written among others to preface his latest collected short fictions, apply right well to our attempts at literary criticism. Mathematics differ from life in this: after a proposition in number or in form-theory is demonstrated the last word has been said; the height of finality is reached; for any one to argue the point might amaze, though it would not interest us. But with life, who can name a fixed and infallible answer to its problems? Here is ever the unknown quantity, irreducible to precise terms, and varying in all sorts of perplexing ratios. Is it not exactly because literature is the literate expression of life that we approach its subtler problems with the same sense of futility as the issues of life arouse in us? Yet the eternal challenge to discover the _why_, born, as it is, with our own babyhood, dies not with our manhood’s strength, but still calls us to try our “literary discernment” once more, and yet once more, to see if we may not by some magic of penetration find the true causes which move back among the shadows.