Flat on his back lay Mark King, his hands under his head, his eyes upon the slow procession of the stars. Just so had he lain many a night in the forest-land--but life then and now were as two distinct existences which had nothing in common, but were set apart in two separate worlds, remote one from the other. Now he saw the stars, as it were, with the physical eye alone, merely because they blazed so bright against the darkness above him; he was scarcely conscious of their gleam and sparkle.

Of old he had been wont to commune with them; through the long years they had woven themselves into his rough-and-ready religion. Countless times had he watched them and mused and hearkened to the message which, as with a still voice, infinitely calming, travelled to him across the limitless vastitude of the universe. Countless times that voice had called him away from the toils and victories and defeats of the day, up into a place of quiet from which a man might look about him with a somewhat truer perspective; he glimpsed futility in much of human strife and striving; he saw nobility enshrined in a "small" act; he marked how, set in the scales of the eternal balances of scope and eternity, a copper penny set against a million dollars were as two feathers; they rode light, and there was little choice between them. He had known that firefly cluster of lights above to be the majestic processional of worlds.