h nightfall, slumber with
dark--there is one to stir within him the greatest sense of
responsibility: the hour of dawn.

If he awaken then and be alone, he is earliest to enter the silent
empty theatre of the earth where the human drama is soon to
recommence. Not a mummer has stalked forth; not an auditor sits
waiting. He himself, as one of the characters in this ancient
miracle play of nature, pauses at the point of separation between
all that he has enacted and all that he will enact. Yesterday he
was in the thick of action. Between then and now lies the night,
stretching like a bar of verdure across wearying sands. In that
verdure he has rested; he has drunk forgetfulness and self-renewal
from those deep wells of sleep. Soon the play will be ordered on
again and he must take his place for parts that are new and
confusing to all. The servitors of the morning have entered and
hung wall and ceiling with gorgeous draperies; the dust has been
sprinkled; fresh airs are blowing; and there is music, the living
orchestra of the living earth. Well for the waker then if he can
look back upon the role he has played with a quiet conscience, and
as naturally as the earth greets the sun step forth upon the stage
to continue or to end his brief part in the long drama of destiny.

The horizon had hardly begun to turn red when a young man,
stretched on his bed by an open window, awoke from troubled sleep.
He lay for a few moments without moving, then he sat up on the edge
of the bed. His hands rested listlessly on his kneecaps and his
eyes were fixed on the sky-line crimsoning above his distant woods.

After a while he went over and sat at one of the windows, his eyes
still fixed on the path of the coming sun; and a great tragedy of
men sat there within him: the tragedy that has wandered long and
that wanders ever, showing its face in all lands, retaining its
youth in all ages; the tragedy of love that heeds not law, and the
tragedy of law forever punishing heedless love.

Gradually the sounds of life began. From the shrubs under his
window, from the orchard and the wet weeds of fence corners, the
birds reentered upon their lives. Far off in the meadows the
cattle rose from their warm dry places, stretched themselves and
awoke the echoes of the wide rolling land with peaceful lowing. A
brood mare in a grazing lot sent forth her quick nostril call to
the foal capering too wildly about her, and nozzled it with
rebuking