so weak a line? "The
sooner it's over the sooner to sleep" is nothing but prose.' He did not
see that the fault which he thought he had discovered is no more than
the intentional 'dying away' of the emotion created by the story in the
common lot of poor humanity. We drove back across the savannah in a
blaze of fireflies. It is not till midnight that they put their lights
out and go to sleep with the rest of the world.

One duty remained to me before I left the island. The Warners are among
the oldest of West Indian families, distinguished through many
generations, not the least in their then living chief and
representative, Charles Warner, who in the highest ministerial offices
had steered Trinidad through the trying times which followed the
abolition of slavery. I had myself in early life been brought into
relations with other members of his family. He himself was a very old
man on the edge of the grave; but hearing that I was in Port of Spain,
he had expressed a wish to see me. I found him in his drawing room,
shrunk in stature, pale, bent double by weight of years, and but feebly
able to lift his head to speak. I thought, and I judged rightly, that he
could have but a few weeks, perhaps but a few days, to live.

There is something peculiarly solemn in being brought to speak with a
supremely eminent man, who is already struggling with the moment which
is to launch him into a new existence. He raised himself in his chair.
He gave me his withered hand. His eyes still gleamed with the light of
an untouched intelligence. All else of him seemed dead. The soul,
untouched by the decay of the frame which had been its earthly tenement,
burnt bright as ever on the edge of its release.

When words are scarce they are seldom spent in vain,
And they breathe truth who breathe their words in pain.

He roused himself to talk, and he talked sadly, for all things at home
and everywhere were travelling on the road which he well knew could lead
to no good end. No statesman had done better practical work than he, or
work which had borne better fruit, could it be allowed to ripen. But for
him Trinidad would have been a wilderness, savage as when Columbus found
the Caribs there. He belonged to the race who make empires, as the
orators lose them, who do things and do not talk about them, who build
and do not cast down, who reverence ancient habits and institutions as
the organic functions of corporate national character; a Tory o