eating the ripe, red yaupon berries, and now and then parties of pigeons circled round and round the house.  Charon lay on the doorstep, blinking at the setting sun, with his sage face dropped on his paws.  Afar off was heard the hum of the city; but here all was quiet and peaceful.  Beulah looked over the beds, lately so brilliant and fragrant in their wealth of floral beauty; at the bare gray poplars, whose musical rustling had so often hushed her to sleep in cloudless summer nights, and an expression of serious thoughtfulness settled on her face.  Many months before she had watched the opening spring in this same garden.  Had seen young leaves and delicate blossoms bud out from naked stems, had noted their rich luxuriance as the summer heat came on—­their mature beauty; and when the first breath of autumn sighed through the land she saw them flush and decline, and gradually die and rustle down to their graves.  Now, where green boughs and perfumed petals had gayly looked up in the sunlight, all was desolate.  The piercing northern wind seemed to whisper as it passed, “Life is but the germ of death, and death the development of a higher life.”  Was the cycle eternal then?  Were the beautiful ephemeras she had loved so dearly gone down into the night of death, but for a season, to be born again, in some distant springtime, mature, and return, as before, to the charnel-house?  Were the threescore and ten years of human life analogous?  Life, too, had its springtime, its summer of maturity, its autumnal decline, and its wintry night of death.  Were the cold sleepers in the neighboring cemetery waiting, like those dead flowers, for the tireless processes of nature, whereby their dust was to be reanimated, remolded, lighted with a soul, and set forward for another journey of threescore and ten years of life and labor?  Men lived and died; their ashes enriched Mother Earth; new creations sprang, phoenix-like, from the sepulcher of the old.  Another generation trod life’s path in the dim footprints of their predecessors, and that, too, vanished in the appointed process, mingling dust with dust, that Protean matter might hold the even tenor of its way, in accordance with the oracular decrees of Isis.  Was it true that, since the original Genesis, “nothing had been gained, and nothing lost?” Was earth, indeed, a monstrous Kronos?  If so, was not she as old as creation?  To how many other souls had her body given shelter?  How was her identity to be maintained?  True, she had read that identity was housed in “consciousness,” not bones and muscles?  But could there be consciousness without bones and muscles?  She drew her shawl closely around her, and looked up at the cloudless sea of azure.  The sun had sunk below the horizon; the birds had all gone to rest; Charon had sought the study rug; even the distant hum of the city was no longer heard.  “The silver sparks of stars were rising on the altar of the east, and falling down in the red sea of the west.”  Beulah