The grass withereth, the flower fadeth, but the word of our Lord endureth forever.

Then it was, if I imagine aright from my old book, that my young novice of St. Sulpice crushed the joy of life, in the frail form of its little messenger, between the pages of the book he held in his hand just then, the book I held in my hand for a while a hundred and fifty years or so after—­the book I bought that morning on the Quai Voltaire—­guarding that little dead butterfly even more than the wisdom of Solomon.  I wonder if, as he crushed that butterfly, he said to himself—­in words that have grown commonplace since his time—­the words of that strange emperor Hadrian—­Animula, vagula, blandula!

Perhaps I should not have remembered that book-hunting morning in Old Paris on the Quai Voltaire, when I bought that beautiful old copy of the Proverbs of Solomon—­with the butterfly so strangely crushed between its pages—­had it not been for a circumstance that happened to me, the other day, in the subway, which seemed to me of the nature of a marvel.  Many weary men and women were travelling—­in an enforced, yet in some way humorously understanding, society—­from Brooklyn Bridge to the Bronx.  I got in at Wall Street.  The “crush-hour” was near, for it was 4:25—­still, as yet, there were time and space granted us to observe our neighbours.  In the particular car in which I was sitting, there was room still left to look about and admire the courage of your fellow-passengers.  Weary men going home—­many of them having used them all day long—­have little wish to use their eyes, so all the men in my car sat silently and sadly, contemplating the future.  As I looked at them, it seemed to me that they were thinking over the day’s work they had done, and the innumerable days’ work they had still to do.  No one smiled.  No one observed the other.  An automatic courtesy gave a seat here and there, but no one gave any attention to any business but his own thoughts and his own sad station.

It was a car, if I remember aright, occupied almost entirely by men-passengers, and, so far as I could see, there were no evidences that men knew women from men, or vice versa, yet, at last, there seemed to dawn on four men sitting in a row that there was a wonderful creature reading a book on the other side of the aisle—­a lovely young woman, with all the fabled beauty of the sea-shell, and the rainbow, that enchantment in her calm pearl-like face, and in the woven stillness of her hair, that has in all times and countries made men throw up sails and dare the unknown sea, and the unknown Fates.  The beauty, too, that nature had given her was clothed in the subdued enchantments of the rarest art.  All unconscious of the admiration surrounding her, she sat in that subway car, like a lonely butterfly, strangely there in her incongruous surroundings, for a mysterious moment,—­to vanish as swiftly as she had come—­and, as she stepped from the car, leaving it dark and dazzled—­