Seldom, indeed, does it happen that a man in the prime of youth, in the possession of wealth, habituated to comforts and the elegances of life, discovers in one brief week how minute his true relation to the human aggregate,---how insignificant his part as one living atom of the social organism. Seldom, at the age of twenty-eight, has one been made able to comprehend, through experience alone, that in the vast and complex Stream of Being he counts for less than a drop; and that, even as the blood loses and replaces its corpuscles, without a variance in the volume and vigor of its current, so are individual existences eliminated and replaced in the pulsing of a people's life, with never a pause in its mighty murmur. But all this, and much more, Julien had learned in seven merciless days--seven successive and terrible shocks of experience. The enormous world had not missed him; and his place therein was not void--society had simply forgotten him. So long as he had moved among them, all he knew for friends had performed their petty altruistic roles,--had discharged their small human obligations,--had kept turned toward him the least selfish side of their natures,--had made with him a tolerably equitable exchange of ideas and of favors; and after his disappearance from their midst, they had duly mourned for his loss--to themselves! They had played out the final act in the unimportant drama of his life: it was really asking too much to demand a repetition ... Impossible to deceive himself as to the feeling his unanticipated return had aroused:--feigned pity where he had looked for sympathetic welcome; dismay where he had expected surprised delight; and, oftener, airs of resignation, or disappointment ill disguised,--always insincerity, politely masked or coldly bare. He had come back to find strangers in his home, relatives at law concerning his estate, and himself regarded as an intruder among the living,--an unlucky guest, a revenant ... How hollow and selfish a world it seemed! And yet there was love in it; he had been loved in it, unselfishly, passionately, with the love of father and of mother, of wife and child ... All buried!--all lost forever! ... Oh! would to God the story of that stone were not a lie!--would to kind God he also were dead! ...
Evening shadowed: the violet deepened and prickled itself with stars;---the sun passed below the west, leaving in his wake a momentary splendor of vermilion ... our Southern day is not prolonged by gloaming. And Julien's thoughts darkened with the darkening, and as swiftly. For while there was yet light to see, he read another name that he used to know--the name of RAMIREZ
Nacio en Cienfuegos, isla de Cuba ... Wherefore born?--for what eternal purpose, Ramirez,--in the City of a Hundred Fires?
He had blown out his brains before the sepulchre of his young wife ... It was a detached double vault, shaped like a huge chest, and much dilapidated already:--under the continuous burrowing of the crawfish it had sunk greatly on one side, tilting as if about to fall. Out from its zigzag fissurings of brick and plaster, a sinister voice seemed to come:--"Go thou and do likewise! ... Earth groans with her burthen even now,--the burthen of Man: she holds no place for thee!"
