Nevertheless they crept out again and looked at him.

"Do you know that your hair is white?" they said, "that your hands begin
to tremble like a child's? Do you see that the point of your shuttle is
gone?--it is cracked already. If you should ever climb this stair," they
said, "it will be your last. You will never climb another."

And he answered, "I know it!" and worked on.

The old, thin hands cut the stones ill and jaggedly, for the fingers
were stiff and bent. The beauty and the strength of the man was gone.

At last, an old, wizened, shrunken face looked out above the rocks. It
saw the eternal mountains rise with walls to the white clouds; but its
work was done.

The old hunter folded his tired hands and lay down by the precipice
where he had worked away his life. It was the sleeping time at last.
Below him over the valleys rolled the thick white mist. Once it broke;
and through the gap the dying eyes looked down on the trees and fields
of their childhood. From afar seemed borne to him the cry of his own
wild birds, and he heard the noise of people singing as they danced. And
he thought he heard among them the voices of his old comrades; and
he saw far off the sunlight shine on his early home. And great tears
gathered in the hunter's eyes.

"Ah! they who die there do not die alone," he cried.

Then the mists rolled together again; and he turned his eyes away.

"I have sought," he said, "for long years I have laboured; but I have
not found her. I have not rested, I have not repined, and I have not
seen her; now my strength is gone. Where I lie down worn out other men
will stand, young and fresh. By the steps that I have cut they will
climb; by the stairs that I have built they will mount. They will never
know the name of the man who made them. At the clumsy work they will
laugh; when the stones roll they will curse me. But they will mount, and
on my work; they will climb, and by my stair! They will find her, and
through me! And no man liveth to himself and no man dieth to himself."

The tears rolled from beneath the shrivelled eyelids. If Truth had
appeared above him in the clouds now he could not have seen her, the
mist of death was in his eyes.

"My soul hears their glad step coming," he said; "and they shall mount!
they shall mount!" He raised his shrivelled hand to his eyes.

Then slowly from the white sky above, through the still air, came
something falling, falling, falling. Softly it fluttered dow