He was with me in the sunshine,--he does not follow me into the shade." A cloud of melancholy darkened his worn features, and he slowly closed the book.

He felt that it was from henceforth a sealed letter.

For him the half-sad, half-scornful musings of Omar Khayyam were more fitting, such as the lines that run thus:-- "Fair wheel of heaven, silvered with many a star, Whose sickly arrows strike us from afar, Never a purpose to my soul was dear, But heaven crashed down my little dream to mar.
Never a bird within my sad heart sings But heaven a flaming stone of thunder flings; O valiant wheel! O most courageous heaven, To leave me lonely with the broken wings!" tinging pain, as of tears that rose but would not fall, troubled his eyes.

He passed his hand across them, and leaned back against the sturdy trunk of the elm which served him for the moment as a protecting haven of rest.

The gentle murmur of the bees among the clover, the soft subdued twittering of the birds, and the laughing ripple of the little stream hard by, all combined to make one sweet monotone of sound which lulled his senses to a drowsiness that gradually deepened into slumber.
He made a pathetic figure enough, lying fast asleep there among the wilderness of green,--a frail and apparently very poor old man, adrift and homeless, without a friend in the world.