decision, almost command, in the wording
of the despatch, which denoted that the miner had taken his warning to
heart and was prepared for prompt and authoritative action.

The time of the train being near, Serviss closed the lid of his desk
and took a car for the station--immensely relieved of responsibility,
yet worn and troubled by a multitude of confused and confusing
speculations. All the way to the depot, and while he stood waiting
outside the gates, he pondered on the surprising change in Weissmann's
thought, and also upon the momentous covenant between them. More than
ever before he felt the burden and the mystery of organic life. Around
him flowed an endless stream of humankind, rushing, spreading--each
drop in the flood an immortal soul (according to the spiritist),
attended by invisible guardians, watching, upholding, warning--"and
the whole earth swarms with a billion other similar creatures with the
same needs, the same destiny; for, after all, the difference between
a Zulu and a Greek is not much greater than that between a
purple-green humming-bird and a canary; and to think that this wave of
man appearing to-day on the staid old earth, like the swarms of
innumerable insects of June, is but one of a million other waves of a
million other years. To consider, furthermore, that all those who have
lived and died are still sentient! What a staggering, monstrous
conception! Nor is this all. According to the monist conception there
is no line at which we can say here the animal stops and the soul of
man begins, so that ants and apes are claimants for immortality. If
the individual man persists after death, why not his faithful collie?
No, this theory will not do. It is far less disturbing to think of all
these hurrying bipeds as momentary nodes of force--minute eddies on
the boundless stream of ether."

The gates opened and another river of travellers, presumably from the
great plains of the Middle West, poured forth, quite undistinguishable
in general appearance from those which had preceded them; and,
dropping his speculation, Morton peered among these faces, not quite
sure that he would know Lambert if he saw him. As a matter of fact, he
would have missed him had not the miner laid a hand upon his arm,
saying, quaintly: "Howdy, professor, howdy! What's the state of the
precinct?"

He was quite conventional in all outward signs, save for his red-brown
complexion and the excessive newness of his hand-bag. "H