Presently, I began a survey of the room.  Now, I saw that time was beginning its destructive work, even on this strange old building.  That it had stood through all the years was, it seemed to me, proof that it was something different from any other house.  I do not think, somehow, that I had thought of its decaying.  Though, why, I could not have said.  It was not until I had meditated upon the matter, for some considerable time, that I fully realized that the extraordinary space of time through which it had stood, was sufficient to have utterly pulverized the very stones of which it was built, had they been taken from any earthly quarry.  Yes, it was undoubtedly mouldering now.  All the plaster had gone from the walls; even as the woodwork of the room had gone, many ages before.

While I stood, in contemplation, a piece of glass, from one of the small, diamond-shaped panes, dropped, with a dull tap, amid the dust upon the sill behind me, and crumbled into a little heap of powder.  As I turned from contemplating it, I saw light between a couple of the stones that formed the outer wall.  Evidently, the mortar was falling away....

After awhile, I turned once more to the window, and peered out.  I discovered, now, that the speed of time had become enormous.  The lateral quiver of the sun-stream, had grown so swift as to cause the dancing semi-circle of flame to merge into, and disappear in, a sheet of fire that covered half the Southern sky from East to West.

From the sky, I glanced down to the gardens.  They were just a blur of a palish, dirty green.  I had a feeling that they stood higher, than in the old days; a feeling that they were nearer my window, as though they had risen, bodily.  Yet, they were still a long way below me; for the rock, over the mouth of the pit, on which this house stands, arches up to a great height.

It was later, that I noticed a change in the constant color of the gardens.  The pale, dirty green was growing ever paler and paler, toward white.  At last, after a great space, they became greyish-white, and stayed thus for a very long time.  Finally, however, the greyness began to fade, even as had the green, into a dead white.  And this remained, constant and unchanged.  And by this I knew that, at last, snow lay upon all the Northern world.

And so, by millions of years, time winged onward through eternity, to the end—­the end, of which, in the old-earth days, I had thought remotely, and in hazily speculative fashion.  And now, it was approaching in a manner of which none had ever dreamed.

I recollect that, about this time, I began to have a lively; though morbid, curiosity, as to what would happen when the end came—­but I seemed strangely without imaginings.

All this while, the steady process of decay was continuing.  The few remaining pieces of glass, had long ago vanished; and, every now and then, a soft thud, and a little cloud of rising dust, would tell of some fragment of fallen mortar or stone.