the
declining sun tipping with gold and silver the dark masses of an inland
cloud.

"What is Life that we should covet it?" said Geisner, halting there.
"What is Death that we should fear it so? What has the world to offer
that we should swerve to the right hand or the left from the path our
innermost soul approves? In the whole world, there is no lovelier spot
than this, no purer joy than to stand here and look. Yet, it seems to me,
Paradise like this would be bought dearly by one single thought unworthy
of oneself."

"We are here to-day," he went on, musingly. "To-morrow we are called
dead. The next day men are here who never heard our names. The most
famous will be forgotten even while Sydney Harbour seems unchanged. And
Sydney Harbour is changing and passing, and the continent is changing and
passing, and the world is changing and passing, and the whole universe is
changing and passing.

"It is all change, universal change. Our religions, our civilisations,
our ideas, our laws, change as do the nebulae and the shifting continents
we build on. Yet through all changes a thread of continuity runs. It is
all changing and no ending. Always Law and always, so far as we can see,
what we call progression. A man is a fool who cares for his life. He is
the true madman who wastes his years in vain and selfish ambition.

"Listen, Ned," he pursued, turning round. "There, ages ago, millions and
millions of years ago, in the warm waters yonder, what we call Life on
this earth began. Minute specks of Life appeared, born of the sunshine
and the waters some say, coming in the fitness of Time from the All-Life
others. And those specks of Life have changed and passed, and come and
gone, unending, reproducing after their kind in modes and ways that
changed and passed and still are as all things change and pass and are.
And from them you and I and all the forms of Life that breathe to-day
have ascended. We struggled up, obedient to the Law around us and we
still struggle. That is the Past, or part of it. What is the Future, as
yet no man knows. We do more than know--we feel and dream, and struggle
on to our dreaming. And Life itself to the dreamer is as nothing only the
struggling on.

"And this has raised us, Ned, this has made us men and opened to us the
Future, that we learned slowly and sadly to care for each other. From the
mother instinct in us all good comes. This is the highest good as yet,
that all men should live their l