What had he to do with death? He crumpled up the written sheets and threw them away to the stove. Other written sheets were lying there waiting to be burnt, all the fugitive waste of an imagination that overflowed its banks. And he began again to write of the man on the road, a wanderer who bowed and said good-bye when his minute was done. And he left the girl behind in the garden, and she was dressed in white and twenty years old. She would not have him; no, she wouldn't. But he had stood against the wall behind which she lived. As close as that to her he had been. * * * * * Again weeks and months went by and spring came. The snow was already gone, far out in space was a foaming of freed waters. The swallows had come and the woods outside the town quickened with the life of all kinds of hopping beasts and birds with foreign note. A fresh, sweet smell floated up from the ground. His work had taken him all the winter. Night and day the dry branches of the poplars had lashed the wall with their refrain; now spring had come, the storms were over and the mill had creaked to a standstill. He opened the window and looked out; the street was quiet already though it was not yet midnight, the stars blinked in a cloudless sky, it looked like a warm, bright day tomorrow. He heard the roar of the town blended with the everlasting hum of the distance. Suddenly a steam-whistle shrieked, the night train's signal; it sounded like a single cockcrow in the stillness of the night. Now it was time for work; that train-whistle had been like an order to him the whole winter. And he shut the window and sat down again at his table. He threw aside the books he had been reading and got out his papers. He took up his pen. Now his great work was nearly finished, it only wanted a final chapter, a farewell message from a ship under way, and he had it already in his head: