mote in the beam of the Universe.  Man has never received Justice, as he understands it, and never will; and his own poor, flagrant, fallible travesty of it, erected to save him from himself, and called Law, more nearly approximates to Justice than the treatment which has ever been apportioned to humanity.  Before this eternal spectacle of illogical austerity, therefore, man, in self-defence and to comfort his craving and his weakness, has clung to the cheerful conceit of immortality; has pathetically credited the First Cause with a grand ultimate intention concerning each suffering atom; has assured himself that eternity shall wipe away all tears and blood, shall reward the actors in this puppet-show with golden crowns and nobler parts in a nobler playhouse.  Human dreams of justice are responsible for this yearning towards another life, not the dogmas of religion; and the conviction undoubtedly has to be thanked for much individual right conduct.  But it happens that an increasing number of intellects can find solace in these theories no longer; it happens that the liberty of free thought (which is the only liberty man may claim) will not longer be bound with these puny chains.  Many detect no just argument for a future life; they admit that adequate estimate of abstract Justice is beyond them; they suspect that Justice is a human conceit; and they see no cause why its attributes should be credited to the Creator in His dealings with the created, for the sufficient reason that Justice has never been consistently exhibited by Him.  The natural conclusion of such thought need not be pursued here.  Suffice it that, taking their stand on pure reason, such thinkers deny the least evidence of any life beyond the grave; to them, therefore, this ephemeral progression is the beginning and the end, and they live every precious moment with a yearning zest beyond the power of conventional intellects to conceive.

Of such was Clement Hicks.  And yet in this dark hour he cried for Justice, not knowing to whom or to what he cried.  Right judgment was dead at last.  He rose and shook his head in mute answer to the voices still clamouring to his consciousness.  They moaned and reverberated and mingled with the distant music of the bellwether, but his mind was made up irrevocably now; he had determined to do the thing he had come to do.  He told himself nothing much mattered any more; he laughed as he rose and wiped the sweat off his face, and passed down Steeperton through debris of granite.  “Life’s only a breath and then—­Nothing,” he thought; “but it will be interesting to see how much more bitterness and agony those that pull the strings can cram into my days.  I shall watch from the outside now.  A man is never happy so long as he takes a personal interest in life.  Henceforth I’ll stand outside and care no more, and laugh and laugh on through the years.  We’re greater than the Devil that made us; for we can laugh at all his cursed cruelty—­we can laugh, and we can die laughing, and we can die when we please.  Yes, that’s one thing he can’t do—­torment us an hour more than we choose.”