A ghost? He had always been
a ghost. From childhood those strange solid people had come and talked
and walked with him, and he had glided among them, an unreal spirit,
to which they gave flesh-and-blood motives like their own. As a child
death had seemed horrible to him; red worms crawling over white flesh.
Now his thoughts always stopped at the glad moment of giving up the
ghost. More lives beyond the grave? Why, the world was not large
enough for one life. It had to repeat itself incessantly. Books,
newspapers, what tedium! A few ideas deftly re-combined. For there was
nothing new under the sun. Life like a tale told by an idiot, full of
sound and fury, and signifying nothing. Shakespeare had found the
supreme expression for it as for everything in it.

He stole out softly through the half-open door, went through the vast
antechamber, full of tapestry and figures of old Venetians in armor,
down the wide staircase, into the great courtyard that looked strange
and sepulchral when he struck a match to find the water-portal, and
saw his shadow curving monstrous along the ribbed roof, and leering at
the spacious gloom. He opened the great doors gently, and came out
into the soft spring night air. All was silent now. The narrow
side-canal had a glimmer of moonlight, the opposite palace was black,
with one spot of light where a window shone: overhead in the narrow
rift of dark-blue sky a flock of stars flew like bright birds through
the soft velvet gloom. The water lapped mournfully against the marble
steps, and a gondola lay moored to the posts, gently nodding to its
black shadow in the water.

He walked to where the water-alley met the deeper Grand Canal, and let
himself slide down with a soft, subdued splash. He found himself
struggling, but he conquered the instinctive will to live.

But as he sank for the last time, the mystery of the night and the
stars and death mingled with a strange whirl of childish memories
instinct with the wonder of life, and the immemorial Hebrew words of
the dying Jew beat outwards to his gurgling throat: "Hear, O Israel,
the Lord our God, the Lord is One."

Through the open doorway floated down the last words of the hymn and
the service:--

_And the Holy One came, blessed be He, and slew the Angel of Death,
who had slain the slaughterer, who had slaughtered the ox, which had
drunk the water, which had extinguished the fire, which had burnt the
staff, which had smitten the dog, which ha