s, and a white mist dances all over it at every
leap. I tell father the mist is the ghost of the waters. No man ever
goes there; it is too cold. The chill strikes through one, and makes
your heart feel as if you were dying. But all down the side of the
mountain, toward the south and the west, the sun shines on the granite
and draws long points of light out of it. Father tells me soldiers
marching look that way when the sun strikes on their bayonets. Those are
the kind of mountains I mean, Mr. Grant."

She was looking at me with her face transfigured, as if it, like the
mountains she told me of, had been lying in shadow, and waiting for the
dazzling dawn.

"I had a terrible dream once," she went on; "the most terrible dream
ever I had. I dreamt that the mountains had all been taken down, and
that I stood on a plain to which there was no end. The sky was burning
up, and the grass scorched brown from the heat, and it was twisting as
if it were in pain. And animals, but no other person save myself, only
wild things, were crouching and looking up at that sky. They could not
run because there was no place to which to go."

"You were having a vision of the last man," I said. "I wonder myself
sometimes whether this old globe of ours is going to collapse suddenly
and take us with her, or whether we will disappear through slow
disastrous ages of fighting and crushing, with hunger and blight to help
us to the end. And then, at the last, perhaps, some luckless fellow,
stronger than the rest, will stand amid the ribs of the rotting earth
and go mad."

The woman's eyes were fixed on me, large and luminous. "Yes," she said;
"he would go mad from the lonesomeness of it. He would be afraid to be
left alone like that with God. No one would want to be taken into God's
secrets."

"And our last man," I went on, "would have to stand there on that
swaying wreck till even the sound of the crumbling earth ceased. And
he would try to find a voice and would fail, because silence would have
come again. And then the light would go out--"

The shudder that crept over her made me stop, ashamed of myself.

"You talk like father," she said, with a long-drawn breath. Then she
looked up suddenly at the sun shining through a rift in those reckless
gray clouds, and put out one hand as if to get it full of the headlong
rollicking breeze. "But the earth is not dying," she cried. "It is
well and strong, and it likes to go round and round among all the