or one morsel of
bread. Around God's throne there may be choirs and companies of angels,
cherubim and seraphim, rising tier above tier, but not for one of them
all does the soul cry aloud. Only perhaps for a little human woman full
of sin, that it once loved.

"Change is death, change is death!" he cried. "I want no angel, only
she; no holier and no better, with all her sins upon her, so give her me
or give me nothing!"

And, truly, does not the heart love its own with the strongest passion
for their very frailties? Heaven might keep its angels if men were but
left to men.

"Change is death," he cried, "change is death! Who dares to say the body
never dies, because it turns again to grass and flowers? And yet
they dare to say the spirit never dies, because in space some strange
unearthly being may have sprung up upon its ruins. Leave me! Leave me!"
he cried in frantic bitterness. "Give me back what I have lost, or give
me nothing."

For the soul's fierce cry for immortality is this--only this: Return to
me after death the thing as it was before. Leave me in the Hereafter the
being that I am today. Rob me of the thoughts, the feelings, the desires
that are my life, and you have left nothing to take. Your immortality is
annihilation, your Hereafter is a lie.

Waldo flung open the door, and walked out into the starlight, his
pain-stricken thoughts ever driving him on as he paced there.

"There must be a Hereafter because man longs for it!" he whispered. "Is
not all life from the cradle to the grave one long yearning for that
which we never touch? There must be a Hereafter because we cannot think
of any end to life. Can we think of a beginning? Is it easier to say
'I was not' than to say 'I shall not be'? And yet, where were we ninety
years ago? Dreams, dreams! Ah, all dreams and lies! No ground anywhere."

He went back into the cabin and walked there. Hour after hour passed,
and he was dreaming.

For, mark you, men will dream; the most that can be asked of them is but
that the dream be not in too glaring discord with the thing they know.
He walked with bent head.

All dies, all dies! the roses are red with the matter that once reddened
the cheek of the child; the flowers bloom the fairest on the last year's
battleground; the work of death's finger cunningly wreathed over is at
the heart of all things, even of the living.

Death's finger is everywhere. The rocks are built up of a life that was.
Bodies, thoughts