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A GREAT time had passed, how great no one knew; there was none to measure it.

It was twilight and it was snowing. On a steep mountain’s side near its bald summit thousands of feet above the line that any other living thing had ever crossed, stood two glorious fir trees, strongest and last of their race. They had climbed out of the valley below to this height and had so rooted themselves in rock and soil that the wildest gales had never been able to dislodge them. Now the two occupied that beetling cliff as the final sentinels of Nature. They were like two soldiers stationed at the farthest outpost against the enemy and remaining faithful after all they stood for had perished.

The two firs looked out toward the land in one direction. At the foot of the mountain in old human times a village had thriven, had worked and played; church spires had risen, bridal candles had twinkled at twilight, children had played at snowball. In the opposite direction the trees looked out upon the ocean, once the rolling blue ocean singing its great song but level now or ice-roughened and white and still—its voice hushed with all other voices, the roar of its battleships silenced long ago.

The two comrade trees had the strange wisdom of their race, ages old and gathered into them through untold generations. They had their memories, their sympathies; they reached one another with language past our understanding. One fir grew lower on the mountainside than the other; it was like a man so stationed on a declivity that his head barely reaches to the shoulder of another man higher up.

A slow bitter wind wandered through their boughs, smote their delicate boughs as though these were strings of harps. The two firs became like harpers of old with whitened locks and long hoary beards, harpers who never tire of the past, of great days gone by.

The fir below, as the snowflakes became thicker on its locks and sifted in more closely about its neck, shook itself loose from them and spoke:

“Comrade, the end for us draws near; the snow creeps up. To-night it will place its cap on my head. I shall close my eyes and follow all things into their sleep.”

“Yes,” responded the fir above, “follow all things into their sleep. If all things were thus to sleep at last, why were they ever awakened? It is a mystery.”

The slow wind caught the words and bore them outward across the land and outward across the sea:

“Mystery—mystery—mystery.”

Twilight deepened. The clouds trailed through the trees; the flakes were formed amid the branches; it was no longer the fall of the snow: the ice-drops rested where they were formed.

At intervals, surrounded by clouds and darkness, the low communings of the two trees went on:

“Where now is he, the strange human one, he of the long thoughts and the brief shadow?”

“He thought he was immortal; to him everything else on the earth perished but he was immortal. Where is he now?”

“Once when he was very proud he said that he had a Creator who made him to lie down in green pastures.”

“He lies in white pastures. All the millions of his race lie in white pastures, not green pastures.”

“Our fathers, the evergreens, came forth on the earth countless ages before he appeared; and we are still here untold ages since he disappeared—leaving not a trace of himself behind.”

“The most fragile of the