n too heavily or else departed from your
stoical way and conscience has made you uneasy; else you could not
attribute life to this foul shell, dead these three thousand years."

"I shall return alone tomorrow when the light is better and have a good
look."

At noon the next day, when the sunlight rested on my slab, the youth
returned and, bending over my black parchment face, peered into the
hollow eye holes; and in some weird way I held communion with him. When
he left, my soul seemed to go along, a companion of his own.

Lost in thought, he walked a long way into the poorer quarter of the
city, where there was much squalor and suffering. He was aroused by the
cries of women and children driven from their squalid homes by a band of
Nero's condottieri, who then set fire to their deserted hovels.

He rushed to their rescue, remonstrating with the soldiers. They refused
to desist, telling him that the people were of the new sect, the
Christians; and their orders were to burn them out. He was assaulted by
them, resisted, killed two and was himself slain.

His soul as a great white bird, with a brilliancy as of the sun, left
his body and flew heavenward. My own returned to its mummied chamber.
But the chamber had been reformed; it was of many hued crystal, of
expansive wall and gave forth a light all its own. I settled upon a
couch and drifted into a restful peace.

My own soul became as the tabernacle of God. All tears were wiped away
by the conqueror of sorrow and pain and death. I had found the Father;
the Father a son; and I entered into the place where God is the Light.

In the meantime Rome burned. The fire, started by Nero's soldiers near
the Palatine Hill, spread from house to house and quarter to quarter
until it reached my couch. The old shell parted and burned as tinder.
Then the mortal put on immortality and the shackled darkness of the old
soul gave place to light and liberty.

I awoke. It was near twilight; the world seemed new and fresh, but it
was the old home place.

I bent over and examined my couch; it was the old slab shelf of the
springhouse. Looking along its raised edge, which I had used as a
pillow, I noticed for the first time crude strange characters or letters
cut in the stone.

That night I asked my father the history of the slab. He said he had
brought it from the Stoner Creek farm near Wade's Mill, where it had
been plowed up in cultivating over a small Indian mound.

I came to the