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Some of the incidental sensory impressions of that morning bit so deeply into my mind that I verily believe, when at last I face the greater mysteries that lie beyond this life, when the things of this life fade from me as the mists of the morning fade before the sun, these irrelevant petty details will be the last to leave me, will be the last wisps visible of that attenuating veil.

When we look back, scenes, and events, and words, and names fade from our memory, and are dimmed by the haze of distance. The past is smothered by what has happened since. Only with a supreme effort, only in solitude, and then only imperfectly, can we recall what has gone by.

Craning his neck and directing his glance through the glazed fanlight over the door of the apartment, he beheld a sight that was never to fade from his memory. In the bare and cheerless room, the conventional bourgeois "parlor," was the Emperor, seated at a table on which his plate was laid, lighted at either end by wax candles in great silver candelabra.

And when they looked upon one another they saw the change. Age was coming upon the Dwellers in Asgard. They knew that the time would come when Frigga would be gray and old; when Sif's golden hair would fade; when Odin would no longer have his clear wisdom, and when Thor would not have strength enough to raise and fling his thunderbolts.

I see him there less vividly than his fellow-pedestrian only because he was afterwards to loom so much larger, whereas his companion, even while still present, was weakly to shrink and fade. At this late day only do I devise for that companion a possible history; the simple-minded Henry's annals on the other hand grew in interest as soon as they became interesting at all.

Then blossom and leaf would fade, and you might walk all summer over the velvet grass, never knowing how much beauty and fragrance lay hidden in the darkness of the earth.

She was as pretty a girl as I ever saw, with large black eyes, a regular Southern type of beauty, and just beginning the downward career. That means, as the girls on the Bowery put it, first the Tenderloin, then the white lights and lots of so-called pleasure, until her beauty begins to fade, which usually takes about a year. Second, Fourteenth Street, a little lower down the grade.

This, then, is the dominant impression which America gives the traveller the impression of a serious old gentleman, whom not even success will persuade to laugh at his own foibles. And there is another quality of the land, of which the memory will never fade. America is apprehensive. She has tentacles strong and far-reaching, like the tentacles of a cuttle-fish.

The constant stirring of the sap of life, the fertilizing influences of mind on mind, after which he had sought so eagerly in Paris, were beginning to fade from his memory, and he was in a fair way of becoming a fossil with these fossils, and ending his days among them, content, like the companions of Ulysses, in his gross envelope.

I declare now with shame, as it abased me then, that for hours, while the darkness fell and the stars began their march over the tree-tops, the ghostly intruder kept watch with me as a bodily presence mocking us both, benumbing my efforts to sorrow. . . . Nor did it fade until calm came to me, recalled by the murmur of unseen waters.