How often man with the big M has robbed and murdered the body and soul of the individual of the race! Was he happy? He had no idea of the meaning of the word; enough for him that complete mental occupation stifled and subdued the rising thoughts ever struggling in his heart to torment him. * * * * * He turned to leave the cemetery. The sun was sinking behind the distant mountains that bounded the western Vega. Amid scenes not to be surpassed for grandeur and beauty on this planet of ours, his thoughts were selfish and mean, and untinged by one ray of the romance or poetry which the surroundings should have imparted to the least cultured mind. He, the distinguished man of science, whose name was known in every physiological laboratory of Europe, beheld all this glory unthrilled by emotion, and scarcely troubled to think, except of the purely physical causes of what he knew were to others sources of the profoundest and most entrancing sentiment. It can be killed—the love of goodness! It can be stifled, suppressed, and destroyed—the heart’s throb of delight at loveliness and grandeur which awakens the emotions of even the untutored savage! And it can be stifled, suppressed, and killed by no surer method than that of coldly formulating, analysing, and materializing, till the sentiments of wonder and worship are dissipated into their elements. To-day, as he turned to leave the cemetery, he thought of his visit, when a boy, to a little churchyard on Bantry Bay, where straying once on a walking tour, he shed tears of joy at first beholding such a wealth of loveliness as met his eyes when they took in the glorious vision. “I was a little fool then,” he thought. Behind him was the pearl-crowned range of Nevada; around him were the richest tropical forms of flowers and fruit; below, the towers of the Alhambra, whose every stone was moss-grown with legend and cemented with story. Still below, the grand old city, fragrant with the odour of knightly deeds; and far beyond, stretching into illimitable distance, the lovely Vega, dying away into the vapoury west, behind whose mountain cincture was sinking the sun in a glorious wealth of colour and a momentarily varying richness of shade unimaginable to those who have not watched it set from that same spot where he stood. And he thought but of the spectrum, of Frauenhofer’s lines, of refraction and the absorption of light. His curse was on him, and fructifying. To lose the sense of feeling another’s pain is, in its culmination, to lose the sense of ever feeling pleasure one’s self. As the poet says,— “Put pain from out the world, what room were left For thanks to God, for love to man?”