s in this new universe that seemed to have
arisen Phoenixlike out of the ashes of nothing.

Gud turned from the child with the prenatally cultivated mind and went
on his way sorrowfully. And as he walked he hummed softly to
himself--"The old-time creation, the old-time creation, It was good for
Unph and Godumph ... and it's good enough for me...."

"Come, come," monologued Gud--"I must not get retrospective--I destroyed
it all--ashes to ashes and dust to dust."

As Gud trudged on, trying to shake this mood of a sentimental
retrospection from him, he found the light waning and the ether about
him turning grey and grim and gruesome.

Then like an avalanche of dead ravens, sable darkness came tumbling down
upon him. But there were whitish outlines in the darkness, moving and
swaying, and there were rattlings and clanking sounds, and eery
whistlings.

Rachitic with fear Gud's knees bent beneath him and he sank down in the
blackness and shuddered in his soul.

Before him, like a great grey army marching, the skeletons of all the
mortal dead, of all the worlds and all the ages that had ever been, were
filing by.

In measured time they marched, their gaunt legbones swinging in great
sweeping strides, their backbones bending and creaking as they marched;
while the winds between the worlds whipped through empty eyes and hollow
skulls and made eery whistling sounds--and all the dry bones rattled.

So the material dead, in the empty mockery of marching, passed by Gud in
vain review.

And Gud sat shuddering and alone and watched them--for eons and epochs,
and epochs piled on eons of unmarked time.

After all the countless and infinitely innumerable swinging, swaying,
clanking, dry-boned skeletons had marched by Gud, they started around
again.

Gud knew that they were going around a second time, because he saw one
pass, bearing before his bleached and grinning fact the glow of a good
cigar.

There could be no mistake about it, for these were the bones of the only
smoker who had ever believed that tobacco was as injurious as the
non-smokers said it was!

Thus made aware that the show was being repeated on him, Gud realized
that even the most gruesome and ghoulish sights and sounds became
commonplace with repetition; and he became bored, and his fear died
within him. So he arose and walked right through the marching mass of
swinging, swaying, rattling, whistling, dry-boned skeletons, and out
into the sunlight of a ne