s the Tune of Time--" His daughter
faced him.

"Father, we must go; you are only keeping the gentleman." Again she
signalled Ferval, but he disregarded her warning. He would not stir. The
story and the man who told it, a prophet shorn of his heaven-storming
powers, fascinated him.

"I took his sins to myself and they were awful. Once every night I play
the Tune of Time in which the wickedness of the dead man is spread out
like dry rot in a green field. This man kept his genius so long stagnant
that it decayed on his hands, and then into his pestilential music he
poured his poison, and would have made the world sick. Oh, for delivery
from the crushing transgressions of another! His name? Ah, but that is
my secret! I ate his sin, and truth, my son, is stranger than theology!
Listen!"

Before his daughter could check him he had hastily donned his armament
of instruments and, tramping slowly the broad, smooth path, began
playing. Ferval, much disappointed, was about to disappear, for he
remembered the racking noises of the previous day. But this music, this
Tune of Time!...

III

It was like the flare of lightning which illuminates strange regions
beyond the borders of the soul. Ferval no longer heard, he felt; he felt
no more, he saw. The white veil was torn asunder, and it showed him a
melodious thunder-pool wherein tapering tiny bodies swam, whose eyes
were the eyes of Debora. They split and coalesced into other creatures,
and to the drummings of spheric harmonies resolved themselves scaly and
monstrous. Never did they cease changing. As the music buzzed he saw the
great ladder of life, the lowermost rungs resting in lakes of melted
amber, the top threatening the remotest rims of the universe. And still
the Tune of Time whirred on, as facet after facet of the Infinite
wheeled toward creation. Numberless legions of crumpled nightmare shapes
modulated into new, familiar forms. Ferval saw plasmic dew become
anthropoidal apes, fiercely roaming primeval forests in search of prey.
The music mounted ever upward, for the Tune of Time is the Tune of
Love--love and its inseparable shadow, hate, fashion the firmament. The
solid, circular earth shivered like a mighty harp under this lyric
burden of love. The very stars sported in their orbits; and from the
fulgurating ovens of the Milky Way there shot forth streams of audible
light that touched the heart-strings of the hairy, erect primates and
set them chanting; thus were