Yet the outline of the tree against the clear, thin sky appeared unchanged. At its very head, the topmost twig still bore green and lustrous pine-needles. The remaining life of the sequoia had taken refuge and concentrated itself there, in those few square inches of supple wood and fluid sap. From the first days of spring the tree had seemed to live wholly for this last branch, which was linked directly with a very fine tap root burrowing deep underground. The only pulse of life in the tree was here, in the circulation of these few drops of sap between head and foot. Breath had slowly abandoned the rest of the tree, to hover hazardous and trembling for a weak while between the labouring root and the little green twig lost away up there in the blue. The tree's entire intention seemed now to lie in this last twig, to the exclusion of any thought of the huge dead mass between. One might say almost that it tried to ignore all the decay, after the fashion of other failing lives. This solitary green branch on the inert bole was like the quivering wing-case of a crushed insect, or the childish and petty busyness of an old man near the grave. Everybody can recall the incomprehensible eagerness of some dying soul to recollect a strayed trifle, as if repose of mind depended on its being put straight: or that other unfortunate on his sick bed who seemed to lose sense of the beating wings of death in listening to the petty ticking of a newly mended watch. Childhood, prime and age have ambitions and goals to suit their strengths, so that the complex and magnificent dreams of youth grow pale and few as life dims in us. Old men have small hopes and mean activity, not because they are weary and sick of life, but because life is abandoning them: and at the final moment, when life leaves us altogether, its last feeblest trace may be a trivial thought which we try to fix, a futile wish we long to satisfy, a foolish interest. This last living branch of the giant tree may prefigure the moment when the last inhabitants of our globe will cling to its last habitable portion while all the rest of it is frozen in an eternal winter, or when the like fate overtakes the last habitable planet of our sky. Life which is made by inches departs by inches: in those sudden cases of apparent and violent destruction it is only that the falling curve dips downward more fast. This we must consider not as a special act of nature, but as an ultimate effect of life moving towards that new arrangement which is called death. Since everything which exists, small or great, is compounded of various elements (an interaction of multiple energies), so it is logical that life should take hold of its matter piece-meal, and relinquish it, when the time comes, also piecemeal.