ked with a semblance of self-
control, but they are nothing. We speak of the soul, but the soul is in
the race.'

'You fret against the common law,' I said. 'You rebel against the voice
of God, which he has made so winning to convince, so imperious to
command. Hear it, and how it speaks between us! Your hand clings to
mine, your heart leaps at my touch, the unknown elements of which we are
compounded awake and run together at a look; the clay of the earth
remembers its independent life and yearns to join us; we are drawn
together as the stars are turned about in space, or as the tides ebb and
flow, by things older and greater than we ourselves.'

'Alas!' she said, 'what can I say to you? My fathers, eight hundred
years ago, ruled all this province: they were wise, great, cunning, and
cruel; they were a picked race of the Spanish; their flags led in war;
the king called them his cousin; the people, when the rope was slung for
them or when they returned and found their hovels smoking, blasphemed
their name. Presently a change began. Man has risen; if he has sprung
from the brutes, he can descend again to the same level. The breath of
weariness blew on their humanity and the cords relaxed; they began to go
down; their minds fell on sleep, their passions awoke in gusts, heady and
senseless like the wind in the gutters of the mountains; beauty was still
handed down, but no longer the guiding wit nor the human heart; the seed
passed on, it was wrapped in flesh, the flesh covered the bones, but they
were the bones and the flesh of brutes, and their mind was as the mind of
flies. I speak to you as I dare; but you have seen for yourself how the
wheel has gone backward with my doomed race. I stand, as it were, upon a
little rising ground in this desperate descent, and see both before and
behind, both what we have lost and to what we are condemned to go farther
downward. And shall I--I that dwell apart in the house of the dead, my
body, loathing its ways--shall I repeat the spell? Shall I bind another
spirit, reluctant as my own, into this bewitched and tempest-broken
tenement that I now suffer in? Shall I hand down this cursed vessel of
humanity, charge it with fresh life as with fresh poison, and dash it,
like a fire, in the faces of posterity? But my vow has been given; the
race shall cease from off the earth. At this hour my brother is making
ready; his foot will soon be on the stair; and you will go with him an