rection
of the body, the life everlasting. Yes, that was the true source of
comfort, after all. He would read a bit in the Bible, as he did every
night, and go to bed and to sleep.

He went back to his chair at the library table. A strange weight of
weariness rested upon him, but he opened the book at a familiar place,
and his eyes fell upon the verse at the bottom of the page.

"Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth."

That had been the text of the sermon a few weeks before. Sleepily,
heavily, he tried to fix his mind upon it and recall it. What was it
that Doctor Snodgrass had said? Ah, yes--that it was a mistake to
pause here 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.

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 is 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 footwa