"It is not enough. I should like the memory of _me_ to live on and on in the world, inseparable from the good I may have done. What am I but the good that is in me? 'Tis this that links me to the infinite and the perfect. Does not the Perfect One wish His goodness to be associated with His name? No! No! I do not wish to be forgotten!" "It is mere vanity." "Not vanity," said the aged servitor meekly. "Wait until you are old, till the grave is at your helpless feet: it is the love of life." But some years later there befell Nicholas an event that transcended all past experiences, and left its impress on his whole subsequent life. II. The hour had passed when any one was likely to enter his shop. A few rays of pale sunlight, straggling in through crevices of the door, rested like a dying halo on the heads of the monumental figures grouped around. Shadows, creeping upward from the ground, shrouded all else in thin, penetrable half-gloom, through which the stark grey emblems of mortality sent forth more solemn suggestions. A sudden sense of the earthly tragedy overwhelmed him. The chisel and the hammer dropped from his hands, and, resting his head on the block he had been carving, he gave himself up to that mood of dim, distant reverie in which the soul seems to soar and float far above the shock and din of the world's disturbing nearness. On his all but oblivious ear, like the faint washings of some remote sea, beat the waves of the city's tide-driven life in the streets outside. The room itself seemed hushed to the awful stillness of the high aerial spaces. Then all at once this stillness was broken by a voice, low, clear, and tremulous, saying close to his ear-- "Are you the maker of gravestones?" "That is my sad calling," he cried bitterly, starting up with instinctive forebodings. He saw before him a veiled figure. To support herself, she rested one hand on the block he had been carving, while she pressed the other against her heart, as though to stifle pain. "Whose monument is this?" "A neglected poet's who died not long ago. Soon, perhaps, I shall be making one for an old soldier, and one for a holy man, whose soul, I hear, is about to be dismissed." "Are not some monuments sadder to make than others?" "Ay, truly." "What is the saddest you ever made?" "The saddest monument I ever made was one for a poor mother who had lost her only son. One day a woman came in who had no sooner entered than she sat down and gave way to a passionate outburst of grief. "'My good woman,' I said, 'why do you weep so bitterly?' "'Do not call me good,' she moaned, and hid her face. "I then perceived her fallen character. When she recovered self-control she drew from her sinful bosom an old purse filled with coins of different values. "'Why do you give me this?' I asked. "'It is to pay for a monument for my son,' she said, and the storm of her grief swept over her again.