With brain and body all a-whisper and a-tiptoe, the Partridge Hunter and I stole deeper and deeper into the Color and the Silence and the Witchery, dazed at every step by the material proof of autumn warring against the spiritual insistence of spring. It was the sort of day to make one very tender toward the living just because they were living, and very tender toward the dead just because they were dead. At the gurgling bowl of a half-hidden spring, we made our first stopping-place. Out of his generous corduroy pockets the Partridge Hunter tinkled two drinking-cups, dipped them deep in the icy water, and handed me one with a little shuddering exclamation of cold. For an instant his eyes searched mine, then he lifted his cup very high and stared off into _Nothingness_. "To the--_All-Gone People_," he toasted. I began to cry. He seemed very glad to have me cry. "Cry for two," he suggested blithely, "cry for two," and threw himself down on the twiggy ground and began to snap metallically against the cup in his hand. "Nice little tin cup," he affirmed judicially. "The Blue Serge Man gave it to me. It must have cost as much as fifteen cents. And it will last, I suppose, till the moon is mud and the stars are dough. But the Blue Serge Man himself is--quite _gone_. Funny idea!" The Partridge Hunter's forehead began to knit into a fearful frown. "Of course it _isn't_ so," he argued, "but it would certainly seem sometimes as though a man's _things_ were the only really immortal, indestructible part of him, and that Soul was nothing in the world but just a composite name for the S-ouvenirs, O-rnaments, U-tensils, L-itter that each man's personality accumulates in the few years' time allotted to him. The man himself, you see, is wiped right off the earth like a chalk-mark, but you can't escape or elude in a million years the wizened bronze elephant that he brought home from India, or the showy red necktie that's down behind his bureau, or the floating, wind-blown, ash-barrel bill for violets that turns up a generation hence in a German prayer-book at a French book-stall. "And isn't Death a teasing teacher? Holds up a personality suddenly like a map--makes you learn by heart every possible, conceivable pleasant detail concerning that personality, and then, when you are fairly bursting with your happy knowledge, tears up the map in your face and says, 'There's no such country any more, so what you've learned won't do you the slightest good.' And there you'd only just that moment found out that your friend's hair was a beautiful auburn instead of 'a horrid red'; that his blessed old voice was hearty, not 'noisy'; that his table manners were quaint, not 'queer'; that his morals were broad, not 'bad.'"