The evening closed in yet more, its clouds slowly veiling the heavens, while the mists thickened, and covered up the ground: yet the unnameable trouble, which so mysteriously gripped the region, had faded as mysteriously as it had come. Unchanged, in its surrounding silence and circumstances stood the giant, serene once more. True it was still tired, and the sap in its veins felt enfeebled by advancing age; but the sense of misery and desolation just now weighing upon it had been lifted. The dismal pomp of invisible minutes of grief had wended its way past, invisibly. These sad, dark, disaster-laden minutes--from what black event, and whence had they been derived? What incalculable journey had they made? and whither would their uncontrolled and endless course next tend? And the great tree itself, standing there so stiff under that autumn sky, so remote from ours--what can have been these detached moments of its life and being which come from its stem to interest us, to bring to our lamp-lighted room the ghosts of its joy and the shades of its pain? What were these acts, these enjoyed moments of the giant's life, that they can so float about us, murmur to us, hold our interest, that even to our dreams come memories and broken incidents of what it was? that as the tale of its death draws near to be told, we feel grief for that huge ruddy trunk? Perhaps it is because the thoughts which take wing from our souls, as from the souls of things, are so many parcels of vital essence, which pass over the face of the mirror of changeless time, and look into it and are pictured there, and then break up and rearrange themselves, but never die. CHAPTER 12 _When the Wood-Dust floated in the Air_ Whilst the August sun was pouring its clear warm rays from the blue heavens upon the world, a fine wood-powder continued to rain down from all the internal cavities of the giant's trunk, in a reddish dust which lay deep upon the roots. The tree's substance had been so falling away for centuries, with every now and then a larger dilapidation when some great cavity formed itself within its thickness: while on the outside the harsh bark as slowly decayed. Beneath the soil in the still-kindly darkness of the earth's heart the roots, regretting their failed vivacity, were now resigned to grow more dry and twisted and inert day by day, powerless any more to suck life-giving nourishment from their ground. On the surface of the earth the eternal counter-change of life and death proceeded. Thousands of births, both plant and animal, occurred, to compensate for the thousands of deaths, the wheel of life impartially grinding out change or creation or destructiveness.