a picture or a symphony; and we’re amazed at our feat, and go on letting that first work breed others, as some animal forms reproduce each other without renewed fertilization.  So there we are, committed to our first guess at the riddle; and our works look as like as successive impressions of the same plate, each with the lines a little fainter; whereas they ought to be—­if we touch earth between times—­as different from each other as those other creatures—­jellyfish, aren’t they, of a kind?—­where successive generations produce new forms, and it takes a zoologist to see the hidden likeness. ...

“Well, I proved my first guess, off there in the wilds, and it lived, and grew, and took care of itself.  And I said ’Some day it will make itself heard; but by that time my atoms will have waltzed into a new pattern.’  Then, in Cashmere one day, I met a fellow in a caravan, with a dog-eared book in his pocket.  He said he never stirred without it—­wanted to know where I’d been, never to have heard of it.  It was my guess—­in its twentieth edition! ...  The globe spun round at that, and all of a sudden I was under the old stars.  That’s the way it happens when the ballast of vanity shifts!  I’d lived a third of a life out there, unconscious of human opinion—­because I supposed it was unconscious of me.  But now—­now!  Oh, it was different.  I wanted to know what they said. ...  Not exactly that, either:  I wanted to know what I’d made them say.  There’s a difference. ...  And here I am,” said John Pellerin, with a pull at his pipe.

So much Bernald retained of his companion’s actual narrative; the rest was swept away under the tide of wonder that rose and submerged him as Pellerin—­at some indefinitely later stage of their talk—­picked up his manuscript and began to read.  Bernald sat opposite, his elbows propped on the table, his eyes fixed on the swaying waters outside, from which the moon gradually faded, leaving them to make a denser blackness in the night.  As Pellerin read, this density of blackness—­which never for a moment seemed inert or unalive—­was attenuated by imperceptible degrees, till a greyish pallour replaced it; then the pallour breathed and brightened, and suddenly dawn was on the sea.

Something of the same nature went on in the young man’s mind while he watched and listened.  He was conscious of a gradually withdrawing light, of an interval of obscurity full of the stir of invisible forces, and then of the victorious flush of day.  And as the light rose, he saw how far he had travelled and what wonders the night had prepared.  Pellerin had been right in saying that his first idea had survived, had borne the test of time; but he had given his hearer no hint of the extent to which it had been enlarged and modified, of the fresh implications it now unfolded.  In a brief flash of retrospection Bernald saw the earlier books dwindle and fall into their place as mere precursors of this fuller revelation; then, with a leap of helpless rage, he pictured Howland Wade’s pink hands on the new treasure, and his prophetic feet upon the lecture platform.