fulfilled the prophecy, and had not willed to do so. Meantime, the
cavalcade, the banners, the music, and the barouches swept past him,
with the vociferous crowd in the rear, leaving the dust to settle down,
and the Great Stone Face to be revealed again, with the grandeur that it
had worn for untold centuries.

'Lo, here I am, Ernest!' the benign lips seemed to say. 'I have waited
longer than thou, and am not yet weary. Fear not; the man will come.'

The years hurried onward, treading in their haste on one another's
heels. And now they began to bring white hairs, and scatter them over
the head of Ernest; they made reverend wrinkles across his forehead, and
furrows in his cheeks. He was an aged man. But not in vain had he grown
old: more than the white hairs on his head were the sage thoughts in his
mind; his wrinkles and furrows were inscriptions that Time had graved,
and in which he had written legends of wisdom that had been tested by
the tenor of a life. And Ernest had ceased to be obscure. Unsought for,
undesired, had come the fame which so many seek, and made him known in
the great world, beyond the limits of the valley in which he had dwelt
so quietly. College professors, and even the active men of cities, came
from far to see and converse with Ernest; for the report had gone abroad
that this simple husbandman had ideas unlike those of other men,
not gained from books, but of a higher tone--a tranquil and familiar
majesty, as if he had been talking with the angels as his daily friends.
Whether it were sage, statesman, or philanthropist, Ernest received
these visitors with the gentle sincerity that had characterized him from
boyhood, and spoke freely with them of whatever came uppermost, or lay
deepest in his heart or their own. While they talked together, his face
would kindle, unawares, and shine upon them, as with a mild evening
light. Pensive with the fulness of such discourse, his guests took leave