It was the last refuge and solace of his often tired and often wounded mind. Even after friends were gone at night and the poker chips were stacked or the whist counters folded; after the sideboard had been visited and temperately forsaken; after the abiding books had done for him what they could; in the still house far into the night, he would sometimes lie back in his chair and survey those battle-pictures of a science on which he was spending his loyalty and his strength. Once, in younger days, outside the Eternal City, he had gone to study those fragments of the Old Roman Aqueduct that to-day are slowly crumbling on the Campagna; and standing alone before it he had in imagination searched for the figure of some young workman who had helped to mould those brick or to finish those columns: the figure of some obscure vanished peasant. So the great wall of his science, being built onward across the centuries into the future, would be revisited by men of the future in places where it stood in ruins. He would be as one whose life with its mistakes was yet linked to indestructible good. He would vanish from beside the wall himself, but his work upon it would have helped to uphold humanity. And many a night he went asleep in his chair, committing himself to his Science, as the forgotten Roman laborer of old may have fallen asleep under his own arch. But, in that same Italy, northward are the Apennines; and sometimes in travelling through these or through the Swiss glaciers where Nature measures all things on the scale of the sublime--sometimes as your eye is passing from snow peak to snow peak, suddenly away up on some mountain-side you will see a human hut; and standing in the door of that hut a single human being; and the thought may come to you that there, in the heart of that pygmy, may dwell sorrow that dwarfs the Alps. The doctor's library had such a picture: it completed the story of the room, and it effaced everything else in it. In a somewhat darkened corner hung a framed photograph of his wife in her bridal dress made not long after their wedding. Once his photograph had hung beside it. The plaster where the nail had been driven in had either fallen out or it had been torn out. He never knew--he knew enough not to ask. As for the photograph, there stood a young bride, looking into her future and trying to conceal from herself what she saw soon awaiting her: the life of a woman wedded but not loved. And there was recollection in the eyes too: that the man who had married her perhaps in the very breath of his wooing had wished she were another; that at the altar he had perhaps wished he were putting his ring upon another's hand; and that if there were to be children, he would always be wishing for them another mother. * * * * *