ncholy, and almost despondent: for this was
the saddest of his disappointments, to behold a man who might have
fulfilled the prophecy, and had not willed to do so. Meantime, the
cavalcade, the banners, the music, and the barouches swept past him,
with the vociferous crowd in the rear, leaving the dust to settle down,
and the Great Stone Face to be revealed again, with the grandeur that
it had worn for untold centuries.

"Lo, here I am, Ernest!" the benign lips seemed to say. "I have waited
longer than thou, and am not yet weary. Fear not; the man will come."

The years hurried onward, treading in their haste on one another's
heels. And now they began to bring white hairs, and scatter them over
the head of Ernest; they made reverend wrinkles across his forehead,
and furrows in his cheeks. He was an aged man. But not in vain had he
grown old: more than the white hairs on his head were the sage thoughts
in his mind; his wrinkles and furrows were inscriptions that Time had
graved, and in which he had written legends of wisdom that had been
tested by the tenor of a life. And Ernest had ceased to be obscure.
Unsought for, undesired, had come the fame which so many seek, and made
him known in the great world, beyond the limits of the valley in which
he had dwelt so quietly. College professors, and even the active men of
cities, came from far to see and converse with Ernest; for the report
had gone abroad that this simple husbandman had ideas unlike those of
other men, not gained from books, but of a higher tone,--a tranquil and
familiar majesty, as if he had been talking with the angels as his
daily friends. Whether it were sage, statesman, or philanthropist,
Ernest received these visitors with the gentle sincerity that had
characterized him from boyhood, and spoke freely with them of whatever
came uppermost, or lay deepest in his heart or their own. While they
talked together, his face would kindle, unawares, and shine upon them,
as with a mild evening light. Pensive with the fulness of such
discourse, his guests took leave and went their way; and passing up the
valley, paused to look at the Great Stone Face, imagining that they had
seen its likeness in a human countenance, but could not remember where.

While Ernest had been growing up and growing old, a bountiful
Providence had granted a new poet to this earth. He likewise, was a
native of the valley, but had spent the greater part of his life at a
distance from that roma