"Now, while this man besought the stars, to him a strange thing happened. As he looked up he saw falling from the heavens above him a ray of the white light of the stars. It fell near to him and lay shining like a jewel in the grass. To this the man ran at once, gladly, and took up the white light, and put it in his bosom, that the winds might not harm it. Always this man kept the white light in his bosom after that. And by its light he saw many things which till that time men had never known. This man found that this new light, with the red light that had been known, filled all his house with a great radiance, so that small strifes were not so many, and so that life became plain and sweet. This then that you see is that Home. "This that you see around you," it continued slowly, "the large trees and the green grass, and the blue sky and the smiling waters, all this is wealth; wealth not corporate, wealth valuable, wealth that belongs to every man ever born upon the earth, and which can not of right ever be taken away from him. Shorn of that, he is poor indeed, though not so poor as he who shore him. Unshorn of this, he is rich. In our land our hearts ache to see these terms misused, and that called wealth which is so far from worth the having. But here, where I have brought you, you shall see humanity undwarfed, and you shall see peace and largeness in the life which you once thought small and sordid." [Illustration] Then as I looked, there stepped from the house a man, or one whom I took to be a man. This man stood in the cool, fresh morning, and gazed at the sun, now rising above the tops of the great trees. He smiled gently, and taking in each hand a little water from a tiny stream that flowed near by, he raised his hands, and still smiling, offered tribute of the water to the sun. I saw the water falling down from his hands in a small stream of silver drops, shining brightly. It was the way of the land, the Singing Mouse said; for they thought that as the water came from the sky and returned to it, so did man and the thoughts of man, and the fruits of his progress; never to be destroyed. At all this I looked almost in fear, for the thought came that perhaps this was not Man as we knew him, but the successor of Man. "Where is this land," I asked of the Singing Mouse, "and what is this time upon which we have come?" The Singing Mouse looked at the green trees, and at the kind sun, and at the blue sky and the pleasant waters, and it said to me slowly: "There was once a city where these trees now stand." [Illustration: The Bell and the Shadows] [Illustration] THE BELL AND THE SHADOWS Melody unformulate, music immaterial, such was the voice of the Singing Mouse; faint, small and clear, a piping of fifes so fine, a touching of strings so delicate, that it seemed to come from instruments of beryl and of diamond, a phantom music, impossible to fetter with staff or bar, and past the hope of compassing in words.