his ears like a name from hell, but it brought no paleness to his
cheeks, no shock to his nerves, no stirring of his pulses. The loom of
Penelope was broken, and forever, he hoped.

"I am free," he said to Martha the next morning, after he had tested
himself in various ways. "The one devil that remained with me is gone,
and I feel sure she will never trouble me again."

"It is good to be free," said Martha, "if the thing is evil. I am free
from all that worried me most. I am free from the old fear of death. But
sometimes I get sad thinking how little we need those we thought we
could not do without."

"How true that sounds, mother. There is a pity in it. We are not
necessary to one another, though we think so. Every one we love dies, we
lose all things as time goes on, and when we come to old age nothing
remains of the past; but just the same we enjoy what we have, and forget
what we had. There is one thing necessary, and that is true life."

"And where can we get that?" said Martha.

"Only from God, I think," he replied.

She smiled her satisfaction with his thought, and he went off to the
pool for the last time, singing in his heart with joy. He would have
raised his voice too, but, feeling himself in the presence of a
stupendous thing, he refrained out of reverence. If suffering Hamlet had
only encountered the idea of disappearing, his whole life would have
been set right in a twinkling of the eye. The Dane had an inkling of the
solution of his problem when in anguish he cried out,

Oh, that this too, too solid flesh would melt,
Thaw and resolve itself into a dew!

But he had not followed his thought to its natural consequence, seeing
only death at the end of reasoning. Horace saw disappearance, and he had
now to consider the idea of complete disappearance with all its effects
upon him and others. What would be the effect upon himself? He would
vanish into thin air as far as others were concerned. Whatever of his
past the present held would turn into ashes. There would be no further
connection with it. An impassable void would be created across which
neither he nor those he loved could go. He went over in his mind what he
had to give up, and trembled before his chum and his father's sister,
two souls that loved him. Death would not be more terrible. For him, no;
but for them? Death would leave them his last word, look, sigh, his
ashes, his resting-place; disappearance would rob them of all knowled