it down
and rest. It was just sundown, and the light was glistening, crisp and
clear, on the leaves of the trees and on the distant hill-points. In the
west a mass of glory that the eye could not bear was sinking towards the
horizon. The eye could not bear it, and yet every eye turned that way.

"Can you see the sun?" said Mr. Dinwiddie.

"No, sir,"--and "No, Marmaduke."

"Then why do you look at it?"

"I don't know!" laughed Nora; but Daisy said: "Because it is so
beautiful, Mr. Dinwiddie."

"Once when I was in Ireland," said the gentleman, "I was looking, near
sunset, at some curious old ruins. They were near a very poor little
village where I had to pass the night. There had been a little chapel or
church of some sort, but it had crumbled away; only bits of the walls
were standing, and in place of the floor there was nothing but grass and
weeds, and one or two monuments that had been under shelter of the roof.
One of them was a large square tomb in the middle of the place. It had
been very handsome. The top of it had held two statues, lying there with
hands upraised in prayer, in memory of those who slept beneath. But it
was so very old--the statues had been lying there so long since the roof
that sheltered them was gone, that they were worn away so that you could
only just see that they had been statues; you could just make out the
remains of what had been the heads and where the hands had been. It was
all rough and shapeless now." [Footnote A: See frontispiece.]

"What had worn the stone so?" asked Daisy.

"The weather--the heat and the cold, and the rain, and the dew."

"But it must have taken a great while?"

"A very great while. Their names were forgotten--nobody knew whose
monument or what church had been there."

"More than a hundred years?" asked Nora.

"It had been many hundred."

"O Duke!"

"What's the matter? Don't you believe that people died many hundred
years ago?"

"Yes; but--"

"And they had monuments erected to them, and they thought their names
would live forever; but these names were long gone, and the very stone
over their grave was going. While I sat there, thinking about them, and
wondering what sort of people they were in their lifetime,--the sun,
which had been behind a tree, got lower, and the beams came striking
across the stone and brightening up those poor old worn heads and hands
of what had been statues. And with that the words rushed into my head,
and they have never