He thought: Between that stone, covered up by the dust of centuries, marking the first spot where the foot of man had touched Britain, and that on which now the mightiest city of all time had been gathered, what cycles and revolutions of things and of thoughts! Here the rude barbarian, clad in skins, disfigured with paint, had knelt in worship before the sun, the tempest, the river, the winds. Here had come in time, pressed out of the East, the fire-worshipper and the Druid. Here men had bent the knee to every form of heathen god conjured up by the weird fertile brain of the North. Here Odin and Thor, in the heat of battle, when the death-blow came, had been implored to open the gates of immortality to the soul that yearned for Valhalla. Here had smoked the sacrificial garlanded bull, under the knife of mysterious priests of the sacred groves. Here had striven anarchy, bloodshed, rapine, pillage, and desolating invasions during century upon century of barbaric sway. While Phideas and Praxiteles marked the climax of Greek art, the half-clad native of these Thames islands was prowling along its banks in a condition as low as the North American savages of to-day. What a history lay in the space between the top of the gilded cross and that unhewn slab against which the first human habitation had been erected in England! Wave after wave of races had passed over the spot. Belgic giants had invaded the place, and pushed back aborigines into the unexplored forest depths of the central plain. Then came Romans, and Jutes, and Angles, and Saxons, Norsemen, and Normans. All had passed between that buried stone and that exalted cross. Each had lived awhile here, had multiplied and buried its dead, and offered sacrifice; had raised temple, statue, idol; had bowed down and worshipped, and been driven away by new men who spoke a strange tongue. Each had come with greater power than its predecessor, had conquered, and slain, and pillaged, and overturned the old altars, and set new ones up. Time after time a stronger race bore back a weaker, and upon the site of the temple of the old faith rose the temple of the new. Until William conquered Harold, there had always been a change of faith with each change of masters, and faith had had much to do with strengthening the hands of those who had fought and won. That august cathedral of St Paul's now stood upon a mound formed of mouldered churches and groves and mystic stones, where people had prayed to false deities before the True One had been preached to them. In the crypt of that church stood the carriage upon which the body of the great Duke of Wellington was drawn to sepulchre in St Paul's thirty-seven years after his crowning triumph of Waterloo; and twenty-five feet beneath that car lay the petrified sides of the first boat and the petrified ribs of the first man that ever landed in Britain from the Thames. Partly owing to the silting up by the river, and partly owing to the crumbling of edifices built by man, that island had century after century grown in height and extent, until it had joined another island close at hand, and in two thousand five hundred years raised its head twenty-five feet above the floor of that primal hut. Every inch of that mound is rich in ecclesiastical history, every foot of earth is the record of a century. There is more knowledge to be extracted from this humble English hillock than from all the books of Greece or Rome; for historians and poets often lie, but cairns, the burial-places of a thousand generations, never! Never? George Osborne drew back from the window. Dull light of dawn was beginning to spread over the sky, and take up the city out of the ocean of darkness. Scarcely a sound struck upon the silence of the hour. All was dreary, chill, forlorn. The pale light fell upon the pale countenance of the man. He covered his face. Never! Never! What a staggering blow that was! Never? Intolerable thought! What, could it be after all that that bone was as old as they had said? Ugh! The excitement of the day and want of sleep at night had been too much for him. He was wholly worn out, exhausted. It was not fair to tax nature thus. It was not just to himself to sit up all night, and then face such awful questions in the cheerless dawn. It was not fair. No one could blame him for being a little shocked and shaken. It was only a shock or a shake, and he would laugh at it as soon he had had rest and quiet. But for the one moment it had lasted, the shock, the shake--call it what you will--was terrible to bear. All at once had glanced in upon him Doubt, the most repellent spectre he had ever yet seen. What! could any mere man dare to impugn the verdict of a hundred generations? From century to century, men of various creeds and forms of worship had crowded around the summit of that little hill. Now, almost within his own lifetime, a set of men had arisen who, unlike the cynics and scoffers of old, undertook to prove, out of God's own earth, the absence of a Guiding Spirit, an Omnipotent Ruler! Now that religion had reached a degree of purity and elevation never touched before, were we to sit still, and hear calm, bland, unaggressive men professing to show beyond doubt that there was no ascertainable reason for believing the greatest theory man had cherished? It was a nightmare, a blasphemous jest. There was the cold winter dawn breaking silently over the vastest city of all the world. How small each individual man looked amid the millions now swarming at the foot of that great cathedral! How infinitesimally little looked individual man under that dome of cloud! Nothing short of the eye of Omnipotence could distinguish individual man on this insignificant planet spinning round one sun out of millions squandered in the unfathomable realms of space! And yet this miserable parasite of earth, man, had dared to raise up his head and declare his ability to prove out of the works of Omnipotence that no such power existed! Which was this, insolence beyond endurance, or insanity beyond cure? Osborne went to the window and looked out. A cold chill struck through him. He shuddered, leaned feebly against the window-frame, and gazed upon the plain of roofs stretched beneath him. He fell into a profound melancholy. His mind was now as calm and settled about its own attitude as ever it had been by the quiet banks of the Avon, under the pious shadows of Trinity Church, that sheltered Shakespeare's ashes. But out there, below where he stood, were men now sleeping who would wake in awhile, and devote their day to the services of Doubt, of Unbelief. These men were worse than the cynics, or the scoffers, or the sceptics. They could not be accused of passion or violence: they carried the manners of sincerity and impartiality; they advocated no code of their own; they simply tried to destroy yours; or, worse still, they did not assail your beliefs, but furnished you with weapons against all you held highest, noblest, holiest. It was worse than sad to think of these men. He would think no more of them now. He would take off his boots, and coat, and waistcoat, and try if he could not get a little sleep. He lay down, and in a few minutes the substantial things of the room faded from his gaze, and a period of unconsciousness followed. Then he opened his eyes again. He found himself in a skiff blown by the winds over the tawny waters of the German Ocean towards the shores of Britain. The skiff was in deadly peril, for the waves were high. She had no sail to steady her. Any moment a broken wave might swamp her. At his feet lay a bundle of skins on the bottom of the boat, and he knew under those skins lay a woman, the woman destined to be the first to land in England. But where was the man? Where was the mate of this woman? Osborne did not know, but he felt sure the man would appear in due time. For days and nights that skiff pitched about the German Ocean. It did not encounter disaster or reach security. At last, one evening, as it grew dusk, and he was well-nigh spent, he saw the mouth of a great river, and steered the skiff in. What a difference between this river and the river of his vision! They were not the same, and yet they were. The waters and the shores of that river had shown no trace of man. No vessel had swum in that stream, no house or hut had stood upon its banks. The waters of this stream were crowded with craft of every size and build. The shores were lined with houses and wharfs, and stores of every height and kind. And yet the two rivers were identical in all things. How was this? Ah, now he saw. The explanation was simple. How stupid of him not to have seen it at once! Of course the reason the river was the same, although it was now full of vessels and had buildings all along its banks, was because in all these vessels and in all these buildings there was not a single living soul. How could he have been so stupid as for even a moment to forget that wave of red wind which had come from the south and killed all living things in London? Yes, that had been a dreadful wind, and yet not so bad as it might have been, for it had killed all. How much more merciful to kill all than to leave some to mourn! Suppose he had been in London at the time, it would have been hard upon his mother and sister; much harder than if the whole family had been carried off together, for then they would have had no earthly sorrow, and would have entered at once upon their heavenly union hereafter. His mother and his sisters were all the people in the world who would grieve for him. He had no other relatives now. All his other relatives were dead, and he had no close friend, no friend who would say more than 'Poor Osborne!' in a passing kindly way. How strange he should have been selected to bring this woman lying down there beneath the skins from the coast of Jutland to the Thames, to the wharf under St Paul's! A moment ago he had thought not a living soul was to be found in all London. What an oversight! Of course there was this woman's husband. He had been sent on before. The sole man in all London was now waiting for his savage wife under St Paul's; and when that woman had been landed out of the canoe, and given over to her savage husband, once more would provision be made for the peopling of London. This savage pair would inherit this vast London, with all its palaces, and ships, and warehouses, and churches. They were destined to be the first parents of the future people of the city. He wondered what this savage woman was like. Hideous, no doubt--hideous, with high cheek-bones and fat flat face. No doubt she was painted too, and had a necklace of shells or fish-bones. He was glad she slept so well. It would have been a dreadful thing to look at such a loathsome creature. Fancy his disgust at being obliged to spend all this time in view of a savage woman, he who had such an intense yearning after the beautiful--he whose life had hitherto been spent with Shakespeare in Stratford-on-Avon, and in the forests of Arden surrounding that town. Intolerable! When he had landed this unhandsome freight he should at once leave this death-stricken city, and go back to Stratford and Shakespeare and the forests of Arden. Ah! here was St Paul's clearly visible at last. His labours were nearly at an end. It was twilight dawn. All the objects on the river and shore were dimly visible. As he drew near the wharf he felt greatly relieved. He should, when he landed the woman now lying at his feet, have performed the great object of his life, and should spend the remainder of his days in placid contemplation in the old haunts he loved so well. On the wharf appeared the figure of a man, not semi-nude as Osborne had anticipated, but clad in a long cloak reaching from neck to heel. Osborne guided the canoe towards the wharf, and ran it alongside. The figure of the man never stirred. Osborne shouted out, and said he had brought the man's wife from Jutland. Upon this the figure moved across the wharf, and, having descended into the boat, caught the bundle of skins and the figure under it, and bore both to the wharf. For the first time Osborne now noticed he himself was chained by the leg to the thwart of the canoe. He did not care about that, for he was not going to land in desolate London; but would now push off, and go as far as Oxford by river. The tide was still running up strongly. The man stood on the wharf close to the edge, and held the woman in his arms. Osborne put the paddle against the wharf and pushed off with all his might. As he did so his foot slipped, and the paddle fell from his grasp, shot into the water, and did not rise again. It had stuck in the mud. With a cry of dismay he tried to clutch the side of the wharf, but it was beyond his grasp. He caught the side of the canoe and tugged at it with all his might, as though that could in that way influence the career of the boat, which now drifted slowly away from the wharf. He was in despair. What should he do? He could not guide this canoe without a paddle or oar. It would be driven against the abutment of a bridge, and capsized or stove in, and sunk. He stood up and looked around him with perplexity and alarm. At length he thought of the figures on the wharf. He was now thirty yards from it. The light was fuller. He raised his head. 'Merciful Heaven, seal up my eyes! Strike me dead! Take away my reason! O God of all mercy, have mercy upon me! Have mercy and let me die! 'Courage, Marie, Mary, love, sweetheart, wife! Courage! 'Maker of me, Maker of the universe, pardon me that one impious doubt, and let me come to her and save her! Oh, let me save her, my Marie, my love, my sweetheart! 'Courage, love! Courage!' He tore at the chain. It would not yield. He stamped and beat his brows in a frenzy of despair. At last he looks calm. A strong tide is running up. There is only one chance. Can he swim back to the wharf, towing the upturned boat after him? There is no other hope. He flings aside his coat and waistcoat and boots. In a moment he is in the water. How cold! He keeps his eye fixed on a spot on the shore. Merciful Heaven, his last chance is gone! His utmost efforts are powerless to stem the tide. He is rapidly drifting away from the wharf. 'Oh, to think I had Marie in the boat, and never knew it! Oh, to think I should have carried her all over those leagues of ocean, to resign her for ever into those awful arms!' The two figures on the wharf came out black against the grey dawn-light in the sky. From the head and shoulders of the man the covering had fallen away, and the woman now stood divested of the furs. The figure which had worn the cloak was that of a skeleton; the woman he had landed was his Marie. The skeleton held her tightly in its arms. She stretched forth her arms to him entreating delivery. Gradually he drifted farther and farther away from that awful group. In another minute the wharf would be out of sight. He turned round, and sought to seize the upturned boat. He lost sight of everything. There was a shout of the waters in his ear. He knew he was drowning, and he thanked God.