The younger sequoia trees which had survived the greatest of their family would flourish for a long while yet, and enjoy the vigour of their cool fragrant sap; but the fall of the giant would be theirs in the end. They would go brittle and inert before the fatal hour. Neither the light of day, nor warmth, nor the kindly earth would any more be profitable to them. Their substance would dissolve infallibly into a fine red dust, smelling mournfully of age. Only time and space, of all the universe, remain for ever changeless. There was a bustle of ants in the heavy dust of the decaying wood, up and down the fallen trunk of the giant tree, now flecked with alternate bars of light and shade. Here as elsewhere life and death succeeded one another. Flowers bloom as flowers fade, creatures are born as others die, fresh springs rise up here as rivers grow dry elsewhere, crystals are formed as others split: and all the while earth goes forward towards its frozen fate. In high heaven the wheeling stars prepare themselves to receive life, or to grow desolate; all is in flux, transforms itself, repeats itself, dies: even what seems to us most assured and everlasting. While we ourselves, atoms of the universe, endure our sentence of imprisonment in life according to inexorable law, until the term of death. In such a chaos, where, amidst millions of clashing forces, millions of destinies are being worked out, what can be the purpose of the all-seeing Eye? what inconceivable end has He designed for the living and for the dead, for the stars, for all creation? Our souls and bodies, our births and goings-out, the details and the wholes, what is the final inexpressible combination which will resolve them all? whither does the huge inexplicable movement tend? In face of such a problem let us remember how we mitigate our terror by being able to take ourselves and our puny acts seriously. They are so small compared with the constellations of the stars, and yet they absorb us. We are able to laugh and cry, to love and hate, in our narrow bounds, forgetting for the while the agony of the unknown which encompasses us, and forgetting to ask the how and why, the purpose of each act of life, its relation to the universe. We are able to exist by and according to the impulses of our own flesh and spirit, as each species exists according to the particular measure and direction of its means.