Darkness and Dawn

that this was no fit time to yield to any weakness--now when a thousand things were pressing for acc

a of what has happened. From now on you must know all, share all, with me." An

explored the three sides of the

ation they peered. Now and again they fortif

gn of life to be discerned. Nowhere a thread

d in the sunlight, no tug puffed vehemently with plumy jets of st

y buried in dense forests of conifers and oak, with only here and

grant station remained. Castle William was quite gone. And with a gasp of dismay and

rotruding through the tree-tops, t

ul remains of the docks and piers lay in a mere sodden

was growing rank and green. All the wooden sh

here or yonder, thrusting up from the desolation, like a

e crumbled in upon themselves, or to have fallen outward into the st

thing's so overgrown with trees you can't tell where it

arer lines of green, I suppose, must be the larger streets. See ho

t all, Mother Nature has set up h

them, from very far, rose a wailing c

, after all?" faltered the

lau

. I didn't till I heard it in the Hudson Bay country, last wi

Then--the

e island now. Why shouldn't there be? All

resent. Time enough to consider hunting later. Let's creep aroun

thern part of the platform, making their way as far as

lest the support break beneath them and hurl them d

e there used to be Broadway. Quite a respectable Forest

t shining through? You know them--the Park Row, the Singer, t

sight. Of the Brooklyn Bridge

uttermost desolation, beheld a dragging mass of wreckage that dro

Stern could quite plainly see, without the telescope, that the Williamsburg Bridge had "buckle

ruin!" thought the engineer. "Yet, even in thei

desire to rehabilitate all this wreckage, to set it right, t

wn powerlessness a bitt

to share somethi

u and--and I--are really like Macaulay's lone

rophets and poets? That 'All this mighty heart is lying still,'

shake his head; but fast

the sole survivors of the entire human race? That race for whose

losing chapter in the long, painful, glorious Book o

e truth and weigh it, he knew he must not analyze too closel

t she

ross the sky. Purple and gold and crimson lay

windows and sagging walls, its thousands of gaping vacancies, where wood and stone and brick had cr

ich alone did not repel or mystify these two beleaguered waifs, these chan

sunset over a world devoid of human life, for the

asses that marked the one-time course of Twenty-Third Street, the forest in Madison Square, and the

eir breath sounded strangely loud. Above them, on

ce the gi

ng over there!" said she

djusted it, and gazed minutely at th

ndreds of blocks had fallen into Broadway forming a vast

hole roof had caved in, crushing down the upper stories, o

rected at a certain sp

eighteenth floor!" cried she. "There, look?" And she

bling hands the telescope sank.

ny longer--I can't, possibly! The sight of that wr

d the platform to the doorway, then down the crumbling stairs and so

her shoulder, he bade her

eason this thing out together, let's try to solv

can't know yet a while, till I investig

the world. But we can find out--after we've made provision fo

a slate, then why we should have happened to survive whatever it was

s; he looked into her eyes as though to read the very soul of her, to ju

I get the proper data for this series of phe

anything that either of us has ever dreamed. It's not our place, now, to mo

nfidingly. And in the last declining rays of the sun that g