Here, though the warmth was great, the stillness was perfect. The rest of the world had retired to their rooms to change for the tennis party in the afternoon. North felt he could depend on at least an hour of quiet. Across the rosebeds and smooth lawns he could see his cattle lying in the tall grass under the trees. He watched others moving slowly from shade to shade—Daisy and Bettina, and Fancy—and presently Patricia, the big white mother of many pigs, hove in sight on her way to the woods. For North was a farmer too, and loved his beasts better, it must be owned, than he loved his own kind. He cut a hole in the orange he had brought from the lunch-table and commenced to suck in great content. Like the ladies of Cranford he considered there was no other way to eat an orange. He also agreed with them that it was a pleasure that should be enjoyed in private. He gave himself up to the soothing peace and rest of his cool shaded room. The friendly faces of his beloved books looked down on him, the fragrance of his roses came in, hot and sweet, a very quintessence of summer. Patricia had reached the wood now; he watched her dignified waddle disappear in its green depths. What a pleasant and beautiful world it all was, except for the humans. He dropped the jangling remains of the irritating lunch interval out of his consciousness, and his mind drifted back to his morning’s work, the conclusion of a week of observation, of measurements, of estimating quantities, of balancing relations. A week of the scientist’s all-absorbing pursuit of knowledge, which had, as his wife complained, made him deaf and dumb and blind to all else. A disturbing fact in his work was beginning to force itself upon him. He was becoming more and more conscious that, in spite of the exquisite delicacy of scientific apparatus, observation was becoming increasingly difficult. He could no longer make the atom a subject of observation; it escaped him. He was beginning to base his arguments on mathematical formula. Even with the chemical atom, four degrees below the ultimate physical atom, he was beginning to reason, without basing his reasons on observation, because he could not observe; it was too minute, too fine, too delicate—it escaped him. He had no instrument delicate enough to observe. He had come to a deadlock. The fact forced itself upon him with ever-increasing insistence; he could no longer deny it. He could carry some of his investigations no farther without the aid of finer, subtler instruments. His methods failed him. Nor could his particular order of mind accept the new psychology. He could not investigate by means of hypnotism, or autoscopy, or accept the strange new psychological facts which were revolutionizing all the old ideas of human consciousness, because he could not get away from the fundamental fact that science had no theory with which these strange new things would fit, no explanation, as he had