time and tribe, their women making futile efforts to separate them. Here
the sense of conquest receives its first impression and is finely
indicated, with admirable action, while there is the symbolism of the
conflict of the nations that has ever gone on, for one cause or another,
and that struggle for the female which has ever been the actuating
motive in war, conquest, and, for that matter, peace.

The next group - always separated by the solemn and dignified Hermae -
discloses "The Lesson of Life," wherein the elders, with the experience
of the years, offer to hot-headed youth and to the lovelorn the benefit
of their own trials and struggles. A beautiful woman is the central
figure. She draws to her side splendid manhood, the Warrior, willing to
fight for his love and his faith. To his left his mother offers him her
affectionate advice, while to the right a father restrains a wayward
offspring who, rejected by the female, is in a state of frenzied
jealousy. Finally two figures represent Lust, a man struggling to caress
the unwilling woman who shrinks from his embraces, and we are led down
from this pair out of the composition to the crouching group at the
approach of the structure, referred to at the beginning of this
description, who here are departing from the central composition.

First is a figure of Greed looking back on the Earth. He holds in his
hands a mass suggestive of his futile and unsavory worldly possessions,
the unworthy bauble toward which his efforts have been directed. Back of
him we have the group of Faith, wherein kneels a Patriarch, who offers
consolation to a woman to whom he presents the hope of immortality,
holding in his hands a scarab, ancient symbol of renewed life. Next come
two recumbent figures, a man and a woman, the first, Sorrow, the other
typifying Final Slumber. These are about to be drawn into oblivion by
the relentless hand of Destiny.