He, too, throughout all his days had been sustained by that sanctuary. And now he was old he was to be cast into those remorseless streets which would deride his feebleness, assault his white hairs. The vision of his father, alone and without shelter in the streets of the great city, seemed to complete his own degradation. What manner of a man was he to give his thoughts to the river, when circumstance had made its first imperious call upon him? He who had lain under the protection of a father all his days, must, now that he had obtained the estate of manhood, become himself the protector of one who was old. It was with the hurry of a great cowardice that he turned to the ancient authors to ask his course. Their reply was unanimous and uncompromising; yet to one of his cast of nature it was almost cynical. He must act. He who could hardly thread his way through the crowd of street-persons, whose lightest utterance, whose smallest resolve was a pretext for the mockery of all who pressed around him and trampled him with their feet, must gird his loins. When he recalled what he had already endured in his strivings to fulfil the simplest offices, which his Olympian companions performed automatically, the blood within him flowed as water. Yet if he failed to procure twenty pieces of gold by next Friday at noon, his aged father would be cast to the mercy of the streets. Every instant that he passed now seemed to increase his impotence. He should be doing, acting; yet he was pasting labels on parcels, or he was sitting in frantic self-communion in the little room. He was wasting hours of ineffable price. “Action, Action, Action!” cried the ancient authors eternally in his ears; “if you fail to act immediately, O Achilles, you will commit the most sacred and venerable form in the world to the pavements of the great city.” Yet there he still sat in the little room with the pall still upon his heart and his brain. At the other side of the table sat the aged man, his father, ever reading in the Book of the Ages. With the childlike simplicity of his many years on the earth, he had sat him down to wait for a miracle to happen. What a heroic resolution and fortitude was required to do that! Yet those faint eyes could read all that was written in the Book of the Ages--perhaps as the reward of their heroic constancy, or perhaps as the cause of it. Yet it was not for him to sit down in simple faith and wait for a miracle to happen, for the once potent belief of this craven’s heart had been plucked out ruthlessly. It was not for him to summon that ineffable courage, which, as the frail barque is engulfed in the waves, can regard the cold sea as though it were the dry land. During the phase upon which he was now entered he had no belief in himself. Formerly when he resolved to accomplish the most trivial tasks, yet failed lamentably to do so, he was ever Achilles. But now--what was he now? He was less than a worm writhing through mire.