riests, our
wise ones, told our history into tales and wrote those tales in the stars
so that our seed after us should not forget. From the sky came the life-
giving rain and the sunlight. And we studied the sky, learned from the
stars to calculate time and apportion the seasons; and we named the stars
after our heroes and our foods and our devices for getting food; and
after our wanderings, and drifts, and adventures; and after our functions
and our furies of impulse and desire.

And, alas! we thought the heavens unchanging on which we wrote all our
humble yearnings and all the humble things we did or dreamed of doing.
When I was a Son of the Bull, I remember me a lifetime I spent at star-
gazing. And, later and earlier, there were other lives in which I sang
with the priests and bards the taboo-songs of the stars wherein we
believed was written our imperishable record. And here, at the end of it
all, I pore over books of astronomy from the prison library, such as they
allow condemned men to read, and learn that even the heavens are passing
fluxes, vexed with star-driftage as the earth is by the drifts of men.

Equipped with this modern knowledge, I have, returning through the little
death from my earlier lives, been able to compare the heavens then and
now. And the stars do change. I have seen pole stars and pole stars and
dynasties of pole stars. The pole star to-day is in Ursa Minor. Yet, in
those far days I have seen the pole star in Draco, in Hercules, in Vega,
in Cygnus, and in Cepheus. No; not even the stars abide, and yet the
memory and the knowledge of them abides in me, in the spirit of me that
is memory and that is eternal. Only spirit abides. All else, being mere
matter, passes, and must pass.

Oh, I do see myself to-day that one man who appeared in the elder world,
blonde, ferocious, a killer and a lover, a meat-eater and a root-digger,
a gypsy and a robber, who, club in hand, through millenniums of years
wandered the world around seeking meat to devour and sheltered nests for
his younglings and sucklings.

I am that man, the sum of him, the all of him, the hairless biped who
struggled upward from the slime and created love and law out of the
anarchy of fecund life that screamed and squalled in the jungle. I am
all that that man was and did become. I see myself, through the painful
generations, snaring and killing the game and the fish, clearing the
first fields from the forest, making rude