Page:In defense of Harriet Shelley, and other essays.djvu/337

 FROM THE &quot;LONDON TIMES

By and by, again. A dreary, long interval after this, then the spectral sound floated to us once more one, two, three; and this time we caught our breath: sixty minutes of life left!

Clayton rose, and stood by the window, and looked up into the black sky, and listened to the thrashing sleet and the piping wind; then he said: &quot;That a dying man s last of earth should be this!&quot; After a little he said: &quot;I must see the sun again the sun!&quot; and the next moment he was feverishly calling: &quot;China! Give me China Peking!&quot;

I was strangely stirred, and said to myself: &quot;To think that it is a mere human being who does this unimaginable miracle turns winter into summer, night into day, storm into calm, gives the freedom of the great globe to a prisoner in his cell, and the sun in his naked splendor to a man dying in Egyp tian darkness &quot;

I was listening.

&quot;What light! what brilliancy! what radiance! . . . This is Peking?&quot;

&quot;Yes.&quot;

&quot;The time?&quot;

&quot;Mid-afternoon.&quot;

&quot;What is the great crowd for, and in such gor geous costumes? What masses and masses of rich color and barbaric magnificence! And how they flash and glow and burn in the flooding sunlight! What is the occasion of it all?&quot;

&quot;The coronation of our new emperor the Czar.&quot;

&quot;But I thought that that was to take place yesterday.&quot;

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