mes for hours in his own mausoleum. He was
growing insane, people thought, in these later days, and they counted on
his soon becoming an actual madman. So far, however, he showed no
greater madness than in wasting his money on a huge tomb, and wasting so
much of his time in visiting it prematurely. The tomb proved a vanity in
a double sense. For the noble owner was seized with a sudden mania for
travel, and resolved to go round the world. Somewhere in mid ocean he
was attacked by fever, or what alarmed people called the plague, and he
died, and his body had to be committed without much delay or ceremonial
to the sea. He had built his monument to no purpose. He was never to
occupy it. It stood a vast and solid gibe at the vanity of its founder.

Over the great gate through which the mausoleum was entered were three
heads sculptured in stone. One was that of a man in the prime of
manhood, with lips and eyebrows contracted and puckered, forehead
wrinkled, eyes full of anxious strain, all telling of care, of pain, of
sleepless struggle against difficulty, watchfulness to ward off danger.
This was Life. The next was the face of the same man with the eyes
closed and the cheeks sunken, and the expression of one who had fallen
into sleep from pain--the struggle and agony gone indeed, but their
shadow still resting on the brows and the lips: and that of course was
Death. The third piece of carving showed the same face still, but now
with clear eyes looking broadly and brightly forward, and with features
all noble, serene, and glad. This was Eternity. These three faces were
the wonder and admiration of the neighborhood, and had been for now some
years back employed to solve the problem of existence for all the little
lads and lasses of Keeton who might otherwise have failed sometimes to
see the harmonious purpose working in all things. The sculptor had it
all his own way, and took care that Life should have the worst of it.
Keeton was in almost all its conditions a place of rather sleepy
contentment, and its people could be trusted to take just as much of the
moral as was good for them, and not to carry to extremes the lesson as
to the discomfort and dissatisfaction of the probationary life-period.
Otherwise there might perhaps be a chance that impressionable, not to
say morbid, persons would desire to hurry very rapidly through the dark
and anxious vestibule of life in order to get into the broad bright
temple of Eternity.

Som