age,
nineteen years ago.

"A strange steely light clung round her, half illuminating, half
obscuring her, and the men drew back in fear, thinking they saw a vision,
till one, bolder than the rest, stretched out his hand and touched the
ice that formed her coffin.

"For eighteen years the man had lived there with this face that he had
loved. A faint flush still lingered on the fair cheeks, the laughing
lips were still red. Only at one spot, above her temple, the wavy hair
lay matted underneath a clot of blood."

The Minor Poet ceased.

"What a very unpleasant way of preserving one's love!" said the Girton
Girl.

"When did the story appear?" I asked. "I don't remember reading it."

"I never published it," explained the Minor Poet. "Within the same week
two friends of mine, one of whom had just returned from Norway and the
other from Switzerland, confided to me their intention of writing stories
about girls who had fallen into glaciers, and who had been found by their
friends long afterwards, looking as good as new; and a few days later I
chanced upon a book, the heroine of which had been dug out of a glacier
alive three hundred years after she had fallen in. There seemed to be a
run on ice maidens, and I decided not to add to their number."

"It is curious," said the Philosopher, "how there seems to be a fashion
even in thought. An idea has often occurred to me that has seemed to me
quite new, and taking up a newspaper I have found that some man in Russia
or San Francisco has just been saying the very same thing in almost the
very same words. We say a thing is 'in the air'; it is more true than we
are aware of. Thought does not grow in us. It is a thing apart, we
simply gather it. All truths, all discoveries, all inventions, they have
not come to us from any one man. The time grows ripe for them, and from
this corner of the earth and from that, hands, guided by some instinct,
grope for and grasp them. Buddha and Christ seize hold of the morality
needful to civilisation, and promulgate it, unknown to one another, the
one on the shores of the Ganges, the other by the Jordan. A dozen
forgotten explorers, _feeling_ America, prepared the way for Columbus to
discover it. A deluge of blood is required to sweep away old follies,
and Rousseau and Voltaire, and a myriad others are set to work to fashion
the storm clouds. The steam-engine, the spinning loom is 'in the air.' A
thousand brains are busy with the