It was reasonable when they thought this world the centre of all things, with the sun and moon and stars circling it round as humble ministrants, that they should believe in some high destiny for themselves. But now that they know how miserably and unspeakably insignificant the world is, it was but vanity and arrogance for any man to think of himself as of any value whatever in the scheme of things. His life was as the flashing of a midge's wings. His end was as a candle blown out in the night. *** One evening, when the air was vibrant with the melody of birds and laden with the perfume of the roses that filled the garden, he developed another train of thought. He pictured the glut of life there would be if all the generations on this and millions unnumbered of worlds all survived. With vivid gestures he passed them all before the eye--low-browed savages, cannibals, fetish-worshippers, Calvinists, and at last the æsthetics of our day. "There would be no room for them--no use for them at all--it would be a glut which baffles all imagination." There was no way out but that the individual perished to prevent the universe from being crowded out. And the cobbler at the top of the brae described to me how his dog was run over in the street. "He gaed a bark--and he never gaed anither. It'll be like that at the end with us a'. We'll gae out like my dawg." It was a queer result of the glimpse which came to us of an illimitable universe--this cheapening of ourselves. There was nothing at last but the charnel-house of the crowded kirkyard, where the generations lay layer upon layer, and where the opening of a grave reminded the old clerk, as he quaintly declared, of nothing but a dentist's shop. The teeth survived for unrecorded centuries--but that was all. It is strange the tricks the memory plays. For, sitting here, glancing over the crowded sheet filled with the names of the dead, I remembered these things. And there came the sense of the madness of the universe and the intolerableness of life, if the end of all heroism was but that--nothingness and corruption. A handful of bones thrown up by the beadle to make room for the dead of to-day--is that all that is left of those who handed down the lamp of life to us? Is that all that will be left of us too at the last? In the ordinary day my friend at the top of the Gallows' Road and the cobbler on the breast of the brae would have said that that was the end. But the extraordinary day has come upon us unawares, and in the extraordinary day this little, burdened, pain-racked life becomes suddenly unendurable unless it lie in the bosom of eternity. If there be no rainbow circling the heavens above the carnage heaps of the stricken battlefields, if the farewell of death be a farewell for ever, how can the heart endure? ***