"Too bad," he said. "A clever boy, Louis. Awfully clever. I feel sorry
for his father."
It did not take long to verify his statement. His name was in the
perfunctory death lists of the papers the next morning. No other notice
of any sort. Only a half-dozen seemed to know that he had ever lived.
And yet it seemed _to me_ that a great tragedy had happened--he was so
ambitious, so full of plans. His dreams were so near fulfillment.
I saw the little grave afterward and the empty studio. His desks
revealed several inventions and many plans of useful things, but these
came to nothing. There was no one to continue the work.
My feeling at the time was as if I had been looking at a beautiful lamp,
lighted, warm and irradiating a charming scene, and then suddenly that
it had been puffed out before my eyes, as if a hundred bubbles of
iridescent hues had been shattered by a breath. We toil so much, we
dream so richly, we hasten so fast, and, lo! the green door is opened.
We are through it, and its grassy surface has sealed us forever from all
which apparently we so much crave--even as, breathlessly, we are still
running.
[Transcriber's Note: Typos have been corrected in this document, but
spelling and punctuation inconsistencies have been retained.]