the war that made it all. I ran away from it. I did not know why, but I was afraid of it. I know now that we did a wrong thing to fight. God gave us the earth to care for. He is our Lord, and we must work for Him, but at the command of His enemies we marched away from the homes of our fathers, and wherever we went and wherever we fought we destroyed the soil and its fruits. That was wrong and God is angry with us. He has sent a curse upon the land.'

And then he had cried out in a voice so terrible that the priest had hidden his face. 'I say we must seize the sword of God and march against His enemies, who rule in His land, and overthrow them! We have been patient too long. We are a thousand to their hundred, and they melt away before us like frost before the sun. We will make God's law of peace our law, and God will be pleased. The curse will pass away. We shall return to our homes, and all things will prosper with us. I say take up the sword of God, lest it kill us all!'

With those words on his lips he had gone from village to village wherever they would listen. Here and there some had heeded and made plans, until before he knew it the movement had swept far beyond him and begun to multiply and increase of itself, and Zteck had created an army out of the starving and miserable people.

III

A low mutter of anger that ran over the crowd roused him for a moment to the present. Stephen was denouncing the crimes of the old rulers whom they had driven out. The mutter increased to a roar, ominous as the thunder of floods in snow-swollen streams.

And now they were here in the capital. It was all over. The king had fled.

Zteck was in the palace, Stephen was promising them good times, and tomorrow these people would begin to return to their homes. Surely hist visions, and the words that seemed sometimes to spring from his lips as though another spoke them, meant more than this.

What, he thought suddenly, if this is only the beginning? Beyond the people stretched their fields, and beyond theirs others, all waiting, and somewhere God. And God had not spoken.

'And now, before you march to the halls where the feast is to be served, our great leader, whose voice has been the trumpet call which awakened us to consciousness of power, will speak to you.'

Stephen sat down at Zteck's side and bowed his head to the applause which was already punctuated by cries of 'Joseph, Joseph,' till the word became a thunderpeal.

'Nothing but a common peasant, and a deserter from the army!' shouted the man in the moth-eaten fur collar to his companion.

'He does n't look much,' remarked one woman to another as they stood on their toes and craned to see; and a young fellow on whose shoulders sat a wizened child gripped the little boy's legs tighter and cried, 'Wave your cap, Tito! There he is!'

'Hush, hush. He is going to speak.' Strong hands were pushing Joseph forward, for he had sat sunk in his chair so long that he might have forgotten what he was to do. Zteck frowned and pulled at his knuckles.

Joseph waited almost dreamily amid the tumult. The shouting seemed to lift him off his feet till he was floating high above the cathedral spires where he could see the whole land stretching away in infinite blue distances, and yet every village was as distinct as though

it were immediately under his eye, even to the little place in his roof which had been packed with moss to keep out the winter cold. He brooded over it, unmoving as the eagles he had sometimes seen in the mountains where they had fought for a time. He stood so long wrapped in his dream that a vague fear spread over the crowd, and it moved uneasily. The cheering died away till the flutter of the pigeons' wings could be heard in the air above their heads. And then a thing he seemed to have known dimly since as a child he had followed the harrow, dropping the seed into the furrows, blazed out in sudden splendor, and the earth was God how else so inexhaustible, the giver of life since time began? And he was aware of a voice that cried from the earth, as Igor had said, like his cattle when they were lost in the mountains.

Someone in the crowd had begun to sob. Zteck half rose to his feet. Then Joseph threw back his head to speak.

A shot rang out, and Joseph cried once sharply and pitched forward into the crowd. Among the stone gardens on the cathedral a figure twisted a moment and fell headlong, and the frozen crowd suddenly woke to life. Hoarse screams filled the air; terrified shouts that the king and his soldiers had returned, that men with guns were hidden on all the roofs. The crowd stampeded into the streets and alleys that surrounded the square, crushing hundreds under their feet in frenzy to leave the place of death. They tore up street signs, doorposts, anything that would serve as a weapon.

There followed a night of such terror as the old city had never seen. Mobs broke into shops and houses, beating to death men whom they found hiding

there, stripping women of their clothing, looting and burning, and, when they thought of their dead leader, crying aloud like children.

When the dawn broke it was as though a storm had swept over the city. The streets were still patrolled by scattered bands of peasants, which dwindled as one and then another leaned for a moment's rest against a doorstep or shop front, and slid down to the pavement and slept where he lay.

In the palace Zteck awakened Stephen, who had fallen forward asleep on the ebony-and-ivory table. 'Get your paper and ink.'

As the schoolmaster moved toward the desk, he picked up from a chair Joseph's worn old cap with the torn ear-pieces, left where it had been tossed the day before. He held it up silently. Zteck smiled a little as he bent down to loosen his shoes. 'He is more use to us dead than alive.'

Suddenly from the hallway came the sound of running feet, and someone beat furiously on the door, shouting in a hoarse voice, 'They're in here! I must find them! Let me in!'

Zteck had risen to his feet, his face paled, and his hand flew to his throat. The noise outside grew more confused, then ceased abruptly. The door opened and the round-headed guard looked in. He was breathing rapidly.

'Who will give me my three cows now? Where are...' The words reached them clearly from the marble corridor and were suddenly stifled.

The guard grinned. 'It is only Igor. He has gone quite mad. He's been down in the square all night calling his cows!'

The door closed, and Zteck drew a long breath. 'Why are we waiting?' he demanded impatiently.

I

THERE was one aspect of the eclipse of the sun, on that arctic morning in January 1925, that the astronomers seem to have overlooked, perhaps because they were so absorbed in mathematical subtleties that the human side of that marvelous experience failed to touch them. We were watching the revelation of awful beauty from above the harbor at New Haven, where the quiet water was carpeted with ice floes and the clean spars of ships were etched against the pearl-gray sky. The railroad yards along the water front, the streets, and the hills beyond the town were covered with shining snow; the bare trees on East Rock were silverwhite like an old man's hair.

As the black disk slipped over the golden shield of the sun and the light waned, the brightness faded from the snow. Then came the brief minutes of full eclipse, when the rays of the corona shot out on either side like golden sheaves and the jet-black rim was dotted with rubies; off to the right, in the darkened sky, a group of planets glittered - silvery Mercury, Venus, Jupiter. All the treasures of our solar realm were revealed together.

At no time was it darker than evening twilight. We could see the intent crowd of watchers plainly, along the streets and on the flat roofs of the railroad station. There were many negroes among them, eager as children. All were absorbed, visibly overawed. Little flocks of doves flew this way and

that, not in alarm, but surprised, perhaps disconcerted, by the unwonted aspect of their world.

Then the jet disk slid backward, the golden arrows of the corona were withdrawn, the planets faded into the brightening sky, pale sunlight was blown across the snow-covered world. The great moment of marvel had passed.

Yet the human impress of the marvel lingered. One could see it in the faces of men and women - a luminous surprise that held them silent, wondering, walking meditatively, the claims of their duties still held in abeyance. Their sudden vision of solar and planetary splendor had brought them illumination: for the first time in their lives they realized that they were denizens, not of New Haven only, or of New England, or even of this our earth. They were inhabitants of the universe. Realizing it, they were filled with awe, an overwhelming sense of the immensities of which they were a part. They had had their transfiguration, though they would presently descend from the mount.

The knowledge that we inhabit, not this green earth alone, set in shining seas, but the wide universe, is a rightful part of the heritage of man. It should be continuous and universal, keeping us alert to our high destiny. Among all living things in the world, it belongs, so far as we can judge, to man alone. Beasts and birds rejoice in the sunlight. Migrant warblers and terns and golden plovers follow the sun northward and southward every spring and autumn, catching the light upon their wings. While the morning star yet shines, robins herald the dawn with magnificent choral song. Tigers and owls, stalking in darkness, pay an inverted tribute to the light. But none of them, save man alone, looks beyond this earth to the outer immensities. Beasts and birds inhabit the world. Only man inhabits the universe.

It would seem to be the same with the immensities of time. Man looks with forward and reverted eye, but beast and bird, even when instinct impels them to lay up store for the future, live wholly in the moment. The bird's whole consciousness goes into his present song. The animal that has just escaped from imminent death is in a few minutes serene and happy again, with even pulse and quiet heart. But man broods over past and future, even though this may make him neither happier nor wiser.

If we compare to-day with even the recent past, five or six centuries back, we shall realize that our conception both of time and of space has expanded immensely, almost infinitely. The general human mind has gained the consciousness which for a few minutes brooded over the surprised watchers of the eclipse. The universe we inhabit has opened out, backward and forward, upward and downward, to a degree almost inconceivable.

Not so long ago, time began for Western thought in the year 4004 в.с. I remember my astonishment when, as a boy, I came upon an Egyptian statue, in a museum, bearing the date 4150 в.с. It seemed to stick out into the void, a century and a half before the universe came into being. And, not so long ago, space was as constricted as time. With so great a mystic as Dante, it is rash to think that we have sounded to the depths of his meaning; but, taken literally, the universe he describes

is a little one, with earth looming large in the centre of a star-flecked shell, in whose narrow spaces sun and moon and little planets whirl, all of them vassals of our central world. The whole of time, for that small earthcentred universe, was limited to scant six thousand years, before which time was not, after which time should be no more. To-day we think of the age of our earth alone as not less than a billion years, and we use proportionate measures for star-strewn space. A marvelous release of pent-up thought, a splendid expansion of the universe and of the intelligence which seeks to fathom it.

Yet this modern opening of the universe is not altogether a conquest of new territories. It was preceded by an equal shrinkage. The date 4004 в.с., for the beginning of things, seemed to Archbishop Ussher a logical and certain deduction from the chronology of the Hebrews, with their tradition of the Flood and the ages of the patriarchs. But the older peoples of the Orient thought in ampler periods, and it seems likely that the Hebrew patriarchs, even with their long life spans, are abbreviated copies of the antediluvian kings of Babylonia, and that these were not persons but periods. Solon, when he visited the Egyptian temples, was told that the history of Hellas went back, not a mere thousand years, but ten thousand; the Greeks, like children, had forgotten.

As with the constricted centuries, so also with the small, earth-centred world. Dante followed Ptolemy, who, in the second century of our era, made our earth the hub of the solar system. But, long before Ptolemy, Pythagoras and his disciples had taught that the earth swings free around an orbit with a distant centre, and they also taught the movement of the sun in space. Copernicus and Galileo were not

altogether pioneers of a new way. The great Samian had already said, 'Eppure si muove.'

Iamblichus tells us that Pythagoras, like his mentor, Thales, had learned much in Egypt, where he spent more than twenty years, studying astronomy and geometry in the recesses of the temples and being initiated into the divine mysteries. He adds that, when Pythagoras was taken by the army of Cambyses to Babylon, he gladly studied with the Magi, perfecting himself in their sacred knowledge, as well as in numbers and music, during twelve years. So Pythagoras, who framed the great word 'philosophy' for our Western world, was a debtor to the ancients. And quite recently it has been shown that the Babylonian astronomer Kidinnu knew of the precession of the equinox; Hipparchus, hitherto held to be its discoverer, really borrowed the teaching ready-made. Since a single precession covers nearly twenty-six thousand years, it is clear that the Magi thought in immense periods of time.

II

So the small earth-centred world lasting but six millenniums is comparatively modern. It marked an eclipse of thought, a shrinkage from an ampler past. But while it lasted the reign of this shrunken world was absolute. It bound the human mind with a band of steel, as Galileo could testify. And it endured in our general thinking until the day before yesterday; it even endures to-day.

Archbishop Ussher's chronology held sway over Western thought when our pioneers went to India to delve into Sanskrit lore, a century and a half ago. So far as the immensities of past time were concerned, Sir William Jones, Charles Wilkins, and their gifted fellow workers still wore the band of steel

about their brows. Their thought and imagination were stereotyped in terms of 4004 B.c. for the beginning of all things. Ancient India was discovered too soon, before the key to the hieroglyphics and the chronology of Egypt had been found, before the long periods recorded on cuneiform tablets had been disclosed. So it unfortunately happened that the chronology of India was explored by men who thought only in terms of 4004 в.с. for the Creation, with the year 2349 в.с. punctiliously fixed for Noah's universal deluge. All postdiluvian history had to be crushed into that Procrustean frame. And the past of India was thus compressed by our unconscious disciples of Procrustes. Max Müller, who had a wholesome respect for Archbishop Ussher, accepted their conclusions, which overshadow all books dealing with India even to-day. So it happens that in an excellent book on India, just published, we are told that the Aryans entered India 'approximately in the year 2500 в.с.' Apart from Max Müller's fancy, there is no better evidence for that date than for 2349 B.c. as the date of a universal flood.

When our earliest Sanskritists began their invaluable work in India, they found in actual use an era, then approaching its five-thousandth year, which had its starting point in the year 3101 в.с. — the era of the Kali Yuga, as it is called. It began, according to Indian tradition, at the end of the great war of the Mahabharata. Immediately, and quite inevitably, our scholars said: 'Impossible! Absurd! That is several centuries before the Flood!' So they set themselves to ‘correct' this ridiculous error, and the chronology of India was telescoped from millenniums to centuries. If they had known something of the ancient history of Egypt and Babylonia, they would have been more cautious, less summary. Only the