in reading the verse. We must read on without a pause--_Lay
not up treasures upon earth where moth and rust do corrupt and where
thieves break through and steal_--that was the true doctrine. We may
have treasures upon earth, but they must not be put into unsafe
places, but into safe places. A most comforting doctrine! He had
always followed it. Moths and rust and thieves had done no harm to his
investments.

John Weightman's drooping eyes turned to the next verse, at the top of
the second column.

"_But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven._"

Now what had the Doctor said about that? How was it to be
understood--in what sense--treasures--in heaven?

The book seemed to float away from him. The light vanished. He
wondered dimly if this could be Death, coming so suddenly, so quietly,
so irresistibly. He struggled for a moment to hold himself up, and
then sank slowly forward upon the table. His head rested upon his
folded hands. He slipped into the unknown.

II

How long afterward conscious life returned to him he did not know. The
blank might have been an hour or a century. He knew only that
something had happened in the interval. What it was he could not tell.
He found great difficulty in catching the thread of his identity
again. He felt that he was himself; but the trouble was to make his
connections, to verify and place himself, to know who and where he
was.

At last it grew clear. John Weightman was sitting on a stone, not far
from a road in a strange land.

The road was not a formal highway, fenced and graded. It was more like
a great travel-trace, worn by thousands of feet passing across the
open country in the same direction. Down in the valley, into which he
could look, the road seemed to form itself gradually out of many minor
paths; little footways coming across the meadows, winding tracks
following along beside the streams, faintly marked trails emerging
from the woodlands. But on the hillside the threads were more firmly
woven into one clear band of travel, though there were still a few dim
paths joining it here and there, as if persons had been climbing up
the hill by other ways and had turned at last to seek the road.

From the edge of the hill, where John Weightman sat, he could see the
travellers, in little groups or larger companies, gathering from time
to time by the different paths, and making the ascent. They were all
clothed in white, and the form of their garments was strange t