Temple and palace, hovel and hut, Dreamer and doer of deeds, At least one door is never shut, God answers all our needs. He walks the crest of some far hill Against the setting sun, The presence of a mighty will Whose journey is never done. Into the night and over the dawn All the things that are Through empty voids go plunging on.... Planet and sun and star. Yet He we worship died years ago Like some poor human clod, And that which wanders to and fro Is only the ghost of God! Chapter XXXIV "A bear went over the mountain," sang the child (Gud stopped to listen, for the child had had its voice cultivated prenatally) "to see what he could see. A row of hanging skeletons, a swinging in the wind, was all the bear could see in front, and he could not see behind." "See here," interrupted Gud, "you have the song mixed--what the bear saw was the other side of the mountain." "Awh, I know," replied the child, "that was what the preteristic old bear saw, but I sing of the futuristic young bear." Gud shook his head sadly. It made him feel archaic to come thus face to face with the younger generation in art and literature. Somehow he felt that there was something amiss in this new universe that seemed to have arisen Phoenixlike out of the ashes of nothing. Gud turned from the child with the prenatally cultivated mind and went on his way sorrowfully. And as he walked he hummed softly to himself--"The old-time creation, the old-time creation, It was good for Unph and Godumph ... and it's good enough for me...." "Come, come," monologued Gud--"I must not get retrospective--I destroyed it all--ashes to ashes and dust to dust." As Gud trudged on, trying to shake this mood of a sentimental retrospection from him, he found the light waning and the ether about him turning grey and grim and gruesome. Then like an avalanche of dead ravens, sable darkness came tumbling down upon him. But there were whitish outlines in the darkness, moving and swaying, and there were rattlings and clanking sounds, and eery whistlings. Rachitic with fear Gud's knees bent beneath him and he sank down in the blackness and shuddered in his soul. Before him, like a great grey army marching, the skeletons of all the mortal dead, of all the worlds and all the ages that had ever been, were filing by. In measured time they marched, their gaunt legbones swinging in great sweeping strides, their backbones bending and creaking as they marched; while the winds between the worlds whipped through empty eyes and hollow skulls and made eery whistling sounds--and all the dry bones rattled. So the material dead, in the empty mockery of marching, passed by Gud in vain review. And Gud sat shuddering and alone and watched them--for eons and epochs, and epochs piled on eons of unmarked time.