y. She died a few weeks ago in the
County Asylum. I hear that her husband attended the funeral. When she
lost her belief in the supernal wisdom and power of her god, her world
must have fallen about her. The thing she had imagined to be solid,
real, everlasting, had proved to be friable and destructible like all
other human building.

IV

The Wonder is buried in Chilborough churchyard.

You may find the place by its proximity to the great marble mausoleum
erected over the remains of Sir Edward Bigg, the well-known brewer and
philanthropist.

The grave of Victor Stott is marked by a small stone, some six inches
high, which is designed to catch the foot rather than the eye of the
seeker.

The stone bears the initials "V. S.," and a date--no more.

V

I saw the Wonder before he was buried.

I went up into the little bedroom and looked at him in his tiny coffin.

I was no longer afraid of him. His power over me was dissipated. He was
no greater and no less than any other dead thing.

It was the same with every one. He had become that "poor little boy of
Mrs. Stott's." No one spoke of him with respect now. No one seemed to
remember that he had been in any way different from other "poor little
fellows" who had died an untimely death.

One thing did strike me as curious. The idiot, the one person who had
never feared him living, had feared him horribly when he was dead....

CHAPTER XIX

EPILOGUE

THE USES OF MYSTERY

Something Challis has told me; something I have learned for myself; and
there is something which has come to me from an unknown source.

But here again we are confronted with the original difficulty--the
difficulty that for some conceptions there is no verbal figure.

It is comprehensible, it is, indeed, obvious that the deeper abstract
speculation of the Wonder's thought cannot be set out by any metaphor
that would be understood by a lesser intelligence.

We see that many philosophers, whose utterances have been recorded in
human history--that record which floats like a drop of oil on the
limitless ocean of eternity--have been confronted with this same
difficulty, and have woven an intricate and tedious design of words in
their attempt to convey some single conception--some conception which
themselves could see but dimly when disguised in the masquerade of
language; some figure that as it was limned grew ever more confused
beneath the wrappings of metaphor, so that we who read