`The one idea,' the Earl resumed, `that has seemed to me to overshadow all the rest, is that of Eternity-- involving, as it seems to do, the necessary exhaustion of all subjects of human interest. Take Pure Mathematics, for instance--a Science independent of our present surroundings. I have studied it, myself, a little. Take the subject of circles and ellipses--what we call "curves of the second degree". In a future Life, it would only be a question of so many years (or hundreds of years, if you like), for a man to work out all their properties. Then he might go to curves of the third degree. Say that took ten times as long (you see we have unlimited time to deal with). I can hardly imagine his interest in the subject holding out even for those; and, though there is no limit to the degree of the curves he might study, yet surely the time, needed to exhaust all the novelty and interest of the subject, would be absolutely finite? And so of all other branches of Science. And, when I transport myself, in thought, through some thousands or millions of years, and fancy myself possessed of as much Science as one created reason can carry, I ask myself "What then? With nothing more to learn, can one rest content on knowledge, for the eternity yet to be lived through?" It has been a very wearying thought to me. I have sometimes fancied one might, in that event, say "It is better not to be", and pray for personal annihilation--the Nirvana of the Buddhists.'

`But that is only half the picture,' I said. `Besides working for oneself, may there not be the helping of others?'

`Surely, surely!' Lady Muriel exclaimed in a tone of relief, looking at her father with sparkling eyes.

`Yes,' said the Earl, `so long as there were any others needing help. But, given ages and ages more, surely all created reasons would at length reach the same dead level of satiety. And then what is there to look forward to?'

`I know that weary feeling,' said the young Doctor. `I have gone through it all, more than once. Now let me tell you how I have put it to myself. I have imagined a little child, playing with toys on his nursery- floor, and yet able to reason, and to look on, thirty years ahead. Might he not say to himself "By that time I shall have had enough of bricks and ninepins. How weary Life will be!" Yet, if we look forward through those thirty years, we find him a great statesman, full of interests and joys far more intense than his baby-life could give--joys wholly inconceivable to his baby-mind--joys such as no baby-language could in the faintest degree describe. Now, may not our life, a million years hence, have the same relation, to our life now, that the man's life has to the child's? And, just as one might try, all in vain, to express to that child, in the language of bricks and ninepins, the meaning of "politics", so perhaps all those descriptions of Heaven, with its music, and its feasts, and its streets of gold, may be only attempts to describe, in our words, things for which we really have no words at all. Don't you think that, in your picture of another life, you are in fact transplanting that child into political life, without making any allowance for his growing up?'

`I think I understand you,' said the Earl. `The music of Heaven may be something beyond our powers of thought. Yet the music of Earth is sweet! Muriel, my child, sing us something before we go to bed!'

`Do,' said Arthur, as he rose and lit the candles on the cottage-piano, lately banished from the drawing- room to make room for a `semi-grand'. `There is a song here, that I have never heard you sing.

"Hail to thee, blithe spirit!
   Bird thou never wert,
That from Heaven, or near it,
   Pourest thy full heart!"'

he read from the page he had spread open before her.

`And our little life here,' the Earl went on, `is, to that grand time, like a child's summer-day! One gets tired as night draws on,' he added, with a touch of sadness in his voice, `and one gets to long for bed! For those welcome words "Come, child, `tis bed-time!"'