e seemed to
stop there. After it, he was nothing.

Our minds, our souls--are like the sun, which shines very plainly as
it moves across the sky of our life of things--showing them in all
distinctness and clearness; so that we see things as they happen to
us with our eyes of daylight. But as the sun throws its dim twilight
shadows even beyond our earth, so do the souls of men of great mind
and imagination see, faintly, beyond their own lives, and into the
shadow of things.

To-night that mysterious sight came to Richard Travis, as it comes in
the great crises of life and death, to every strong man, and he saw
dimly, ghostily, into the shadow; and the shadow stopped at the
terrible abyss which now barred his ken; and he felt, with the keen
insight of the dying eagle on the peak, that the thing was death.

In the first streak of light, he was rudely awakened to it. For there
on the rug, as naturally as if asleep, lay the only thing he now
loved in the world, the old setter, whose life had passed out in
slumber.

All animals have the dying instinct. Man, the highest, has it the
clearest. And Travis remembered that the old dog had come to his bed,
in the middle of the night, and laid his large beautiful head on his
master's breast, and in the dim light of the smouldering fire had
said good-bye to Richard Travis as plainly as ever human being said
it. And now on the rug, before the dead gray ashes of the night, he
had found the old dog forever asleep, naturally and in great peace.

His heart sank as he thought of the farewell of the night before, and
bitterness came, and sitting down on the rug by the side of the dead
dog he stroked for the last time the grand old silken head, so calm
and poised, for the little world it had been bred for, and ran his
palm over the long strong nose that had never lied to the scent of
the covey. His lips tightened and he said: "O God, I am dying myself,
and there is not a living being whom I can crawl up to, and lay my
head on its breast and know it loves and pities me, as I love you,
old friend."

The thought gripped his throat, and as he thought of the sweetness
and nobility of this dumb thing, his gentleness, faithfulness and
devotion, the sureness of his life in filling the mission he came
for, he wept tears so strange to his cheek that they scalded as they
flowed, and he bowed his head and said: "Gladstone, Gladstone,
good-bye--true to your breeding, you were what your master never