and dumb,
watching Death till he died.

Leo was the last of the Children of the Zodiac. After his death there
sprang up a breed of little mean men, whimpering and flinching and
howling because the Houses killed them and theirs, who wished to live
forever without any pain. They did not increase their lives, but they
increased their own torments miserably, and there were no Children of
the Zodiac to guide them, and the greater part of Leo's songs were
lost.

Only he had carved on the Girl's tombstone the last verse of the Song
of the Girl, which stands at the head of this story.

One of the children of men, coming thousands of years later, rubbed
away the lichen, read the lines, and applied them to a trouble other
than the one Leo meant. Being a man, men believed that he had made the
verses himself; but they belong to Leo, the Child of the Zodiac, and
teach, as he taught, that what comes or does not come, we must not be
afraid.

III

THE BRIDGE BUILDERS

The least that Findlayson, of the Public Works Department, expected
was a C.I.E.; he dreamed of a C.S.I.: indeed his friends told him that
he deserved more. For three years he had endured heat and cold,
disappointment, discomfort, danger, and disease, with responsibility
almost too heavy for one pair of shoulders; and day by day, through
that time, the great Kashi Bridge over the Ganges had grown under his
charge. Now, in less than three months, if all went well, His
Excellency the Viceroy would open the bridge in state, an archbishop
would bless it, the first train-load of soldiers would come over it,
and there would be speeches.

Findlayson, C. E., sat in his trolley on a construction-line that ran
along one of the main revetments--the huge, stone-faced banks that flared
away north and south for three miles on either side of the river--and
permitted himself to think of the end. With its approaches, his work was
one mile and three-quarters in length; a lattice-girder bridge, trussed
with the Findlayson truss, standing on seven-and-twenty brick piers. Each
one of those piers was twenty-four feet in diameter, capped with red Agra
stone and sunk eighty feet below the shifting sand of the Ganges' bed.
Above them ran the railway-line fifteen feet broad; above that, again, a
cart-road of eighteen feet, flanked with footpaths. At either end rose
towers of red brick, loopholed for musketry and pierced for big guns, and
the ramp of the road was being pushed for