hundredth
part truth, and it assumed proportions so huge that he could see nothing
else. In such a state the human brain is an infernal machine and its
workings can only be conquered if the mortal thing which lives with it--
day and night, night and day--has learned to separate its controllable
from its seemingly uncontrollable atoms, and can silence its clamor on
its way to madness.

Antony Dart had not learned this thing and the clamor had had its
hideous way with him. Physicians would have given a name to his mental
and physical condition. He had heard these names often--applied to men
the strain of whose lives had been like the strain of his own, and had
left them as it had left him--jaded, joyless, breaking things. Some of
them had been broken and had died or were dragging out bruised and
tormented days in their own homes or in mad-houses. He always shuddered
when he heard their names, and rebelled with sick fear against the mere
mention of them. They had worked as he had worked, they had been
stricken with the delirium of accumulation--accumulation--as he had
been. They had been caught in the rush and swirl of the great
maelstrom, and had been borne round and round in it, until having
grasped every coveted thing tossing upon its circling waters, they
themselves had been flung upon the shore with both hands full, the rocks
about them strewn with rich possessions, while they lay prostrate and
gazed at all life had brought with dull, hopeless, anguished eyes. He
knew--if the worst came to the worst--what would be said of him,
because he had heard it said of others. "He worked too hard--he worked
too hard." He was sick of hearing it. What was wrong with the world--
what was wrong with man, as Man--if work could break him like this? If
one believed in Deity, the living creature It breathed into being must
be a perfect thing--not one to be wearied, sickened, tortured by the
life Its breathing had created. A mere man would disdain to build a
thing so poor and incomplete. A mere human engineer who constructed an
engine whose workings were perpetually at fault--which went wrong when
called upon to do the labor it was made for--who would not scoff at it
and cast it aside as a piece of worthless bungling?

"Something is wrong," he muttered, lying flat upon his cross and staring
at the yellow haze which had crept through crannies in window-sashes
into the room. "Someone is wrong. Is it I--or You?"

His thin li