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These truths and many more I should have learned from him, these extravagences and some few others I should have whimsically heard, had I not (since I was young) attempted argument and said to him: “But all these things change, and what we love so much is, after all, only what we have known in our short time, and it is our souls within that lend divinity to any place, for, save within the soul, all is subject to time.”
He shook his head determinedly and like one who knows. He did assure me that in a subtle mastering manner the land that bore us made us ourselves, and was the major and the dominant power which moulded, as with firm hands, the clay of our being and which designed and gave us, and continued in us, all the form in which we are.
“You cannot tell this,” I said, “and neither can I; it is all guesswork to the brevity of man.”
“You are wrong,” he answered quietly. “I have watched these things for quite 3000 years.” And before I had time to gasp at that word he had disappeared.
