Finding myself near the excavation, I entered the subterranean chamber and sat down there.
"This," I muttered to myself, "is the only home I have.

Let me stay here, and not go forth any more." Seeking aid from the familiar surroundings, I endeavored to find a sad sort of consolation in reviving the past and summoning up the forms and faces that were about me in my former life.

It was in vain.

There was no longer any life in them.

For nearly one hundred years the stars had been looking down on Edith Bartlett's grave, and the graves of all my generation.
The past was dead, crushed beneath a century's weight, and from the present I was shut out.