him that he felt more deeply than these publicans and fishers, yet Jesus
retained them and sent him away.

The manuscript glided from his hand to the floor, and his thoughts
wandered back to Alexandria, and he sat thinking that death must be
rather the beginning than the end of things, for it were impossible to
believe that life was an end in itself. Heraclitus was right: his
present life could be nothing else but the death of another life. And as
if to enforce this doctrine a recollection of his grandmother intruded
upon his meditation. She was seventy-eight when she died, and her
intellect must have faded some months before, but with her passing one
of the servants told him that a curious expression came into her face--a
sort of mocking expression, as if she had learnt the truth at last and
was laughing at the dupes she left behind. She lay in a grave in
Galilee, under some pleasant trees, and while thinking of her grave it
occurred to him that he would not like to be put into the earth; his
fancy favoured a tomb cut out of the rocks in Mount Scropas, for there,
he said to himself, I shall be far from the Scribes and Pharisees, and
going out on the terrace he stood under the cedars and watched for an
hour the outlines of the humped hills that God had driven in endless
disorder, like herds of cattle, all the way to Jericho, thinking all the
while that it would be pleasant to lie out of hearing of all the silly
hurly-burly that we call life. But the hurly-burly would not be silly if
Jesus were by him, and he asked himself if Jesus was an illusion like
all the rest, and as soon as the pain the question provoked had died
away, his desire of a tomb took possession of him again, and it left him
no peace, but led him out of the house every evening, up a zigzagging
path along the hillside till he came to some rocks over against the
desert. I shall lie in quiet here till he calls me, on a couch embedded
in the wall and surmounted by an arch--but if he should prefer me to
rise out of an humble grave? That I may not know, only that the poorest
is not as unhappy as I, so I may as well have a tomb to my liking.

It was a long time since he had come to a resolve, and having come to
one at last, he was happier. And in more cheerful mood he decided that
now that the site was settled it would be well to seek information as to
which are the best workmen to employ on the job.

But for him whose thoughts run on death nothing is harder