t up by the inclosing cylinder.
Arrived at the bottom, and feeling about, he could not find the door to
the outer air which the butler had shown him; it was wall wherever his
hands fell. He could not find again the stair he had left; he could
not tell in what direction it lay.

He had got into a long windowless passage connecting two wings of the
house, and in this he was feeling his way, fearful of falling down some
stair or trap. He came at last to a door--low-browed like almost all
in the house. Opening it--was it a thinner darkness or the faintest
gleam of light he saw? And was that again the sound he had followed,
fainter and farther off than before--a downy wind-wafted plume from the
skirt of some stray harmony? At such a time of the night surely it was
strange! It must come from one who could not sleep, and was solacing
himself with sweet sounds, breathing a soul into the uncompanionable
silence! If so it was, he had no right to search farther! But how was
he to return? He dared hardly move, lest he should be found wandering
over the house in the dead of night like a thief, or one searching
after its secrets. He must sit down and wait for the morning: its
earliest light would perhaps enable him to find his way to his quarters!

Feeling about him a little, his foot struck against the step of a
stair. Examining it with his hands, he believed it the same he had
ascended in the morning: even in a great castle, could there be two
such royal stairs? He sat down upon it, and leaning his head on his
hands, composed himself to a patient waiting for the light.

Waiting pure is perhaps the hardest thing for flesh and blood to do
well. The relations of time to mind are very strange. Some of their
phenomena seem to prove that time is only of the mind--belonging to the
intellect as good and evil belong to the spirit. Anyhow, if it were
not for the clocks of the universe, one man would live a year, a
century, where another would live but a day. But the mere motion of
time, not to say the consciousness of empty time, is fearful. It is
this empty time that the fool is always trying to kill: his effort
should be to fill it. Yet nothing but the living God can fill
it--though it be but the shape our existence takes to us. Only where
he is, emptiness is not. Eternity will be but an intense present to the
child with whom is the Father.

Such thoughts alighted, flitted, and passed, for the first few moments,
thro