It was the
strangest, saddest jest! It brought Middleton up with such a sudden
revulsion that he grew dizzy, and the room swam round him and the cabinet
dazzled before his eyes. It had been magnified to a palace; it had
dwindled down to Liliputian size; and yet, up till now, it had seemed to
contain in its diminutiveness all the riches which he had attributed to
its magnitude. This last moment had utterly subverted it; the whole
great structure seemed to vanish.
"See; here are the dust and ashes of it," observed Alice, taking
something that was indeed only a pinch of dust out of the secret
compartment. "There is nothing else."
II.
May 5th, Wednesday.--The father of these two sons, an aged man at the
time, took much to heart their enmity; and after the catastrophe, he
never held up his head again. He was not told that his son had perished,
though such was the belief of the family; but imbibed the opinion that he
had left his home and native land to become a wanderer on the face of the
earth, and that some time or other he might return. In this idea he
spent the remainder of his days; in this idea he died. It may be that
the influence of this idea might be traced in the way in which he spent
some of the latter years of his life, and a portion of the wealth which
had become of little value in his eyes, since it had caused dissension
and bloodshed between the sons of one household.
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