He must have thought a long time:  the clock not far away struck twelve.  He took off his glasses, putting them negligently on the edge of the ash tray which tipped over beneath their weight and fell to the floor:  he picked up his glasses, but let the ashes lie.  Then he stooped down to take off his shoes, not without sounds of bodily discomfort.

Aroused by these sounds or for other reasons not to be discovered, there emerged from under a table on which was piled “The Lives of the Chief Justices” a bulldog, cylindrical and rigid with years.  Having reached a decorous position before the Judge, by the slow action of the necessary machinery he lowered the posterior end of the cylinder to the floor and watched him.

“Well, did I get them off about right?”

The dog with a private glance of sympathy up into the Judge’s face returned to his black goatskin rug under the Chief Justices; and the Judge, turning off the burners in the chandelier and striking a match, groped his way in his sock feet to his bedroom—­to the bed with its one pillow.

V

Out in the country next morning it was not yet break of dawn.  The stars, thickly flung about, were flashing low and yellow as at midnight, but on the horizon the great change had begun.  Not with colors of rose or pearl but as the mysterious foreknowledge of the morning, when a vast swift herald rushes up from the east and sweeps onward across high space, bidding the earth be in readiness for the drama of the sun.

The land, heavy with life, lay wrapped in silence, steeped in rest.  Not a bird in wet hedge or evergreen had drawn nimble head from nimble wing.  In meadow and pasture fold and herd had sunk down satisfied.  A black brook brawling through a distant wood sounded loud in the stillness.  Under the forest trees around the home of the Merediths only drops of dew might have been heard splashing downward from leaf to leaf.  In the house all slept.  The mind, wakefullest of happy or of suffering things, had lost consciousness of joy and care save as these had been crowded down into the chamber which lies beneath our sleep, whence they made themselves audible through the thin flooring as the noise of dreams.

Among the parts of the day during which man may match the elements of the world within him to the world without—­his songs with its sunrises, toil with noontide, prayer with nightfall, slumber with dark—­there is one to stir within him the greatest sense of responsibility:  the hour of dawn.

If he awaken then and be alone, he is earliest to enter the silent empty theatre of the earth where the human drama is soon to recommence.  Not a mummer has stalked forth; not an auditor sits waiting.  He himself, as one of the characters in this ancient miracle play of nature, pauses at the point of separation between all that he has enacted and all that he will enact.  Yesterday he was in the thick of action.