what gives one, like the rich fool, the sense of false security of goods stored up for the years?  We are set in life to feel insecure, or at all events to gain stability and security of soul, not to prop up our failing and timid senses upon the pillows of wealth and ease and circumstance.  The man whom I entirely envy is the man who walks into the dark valley of misfortune or sickness or grief, or the shadow of death, with a curious and inexpressible zest for facing and interrogating the presences that haunt the place.  For a man who does this, his memory is not like a land where he loves to linger upon the sunlit ridges of happy recollection, but a land where in reflection he threads in backward thought the dark vale, the miry road, the craggy rift up which he painfully climbed; the optimism that hurries with averted glance past the shadow is as false as the pessimism that hurries timidly across the bright and flowery meadow.  The more we realise the immutability of our lot, the more grateful we become for our pains as well as for our delights.  If we have still lives to live and regions to traverse, after our eyes close upon the world, those lives and those regions may be, as we love to think, tracts of serener happiness and more equable tranquillity.  But if they be still a mixture, such as we here endure, of pain and pleasure, then our aim ought to be at all costs to learn the lesson of endurance; or rather, if we hold firmly to the sense of law, minute, pervading, unalterable law, to welcome every step we make in the direction of courage and hopefulness.  In the midst of atrocious sorrow and suffering there is no sense so blessed as the sense that dawns upon the suffering heart that it can indeed endure what it had represented to itself as unendurable, and that however sharply it suffers, there is still an inalienable residue of force and vitality which cannot be exhausted.

IV

Such a perfect day:  the sky cloudless; sunlight like pale gold or amber; soft mists in the distance; a delicate air, gently stirred, fresh, with no poisonous nip in it.  I knew last night it would be fine, for the gale had blown itself out, and when I came in at sunset the chimneys and shoulders of the Hall stood out dark against the orange glow.  The beloved house seemed to welcome me back, and as I came across the footpath, through the pasture, I saw in the brightly-lighted kitchen the hands of some one whose face I could not see, in the golden circle of lamplight, deftly moving, preparing something, for my use perhaps.

Yet for all that I am ill at ease; and as I walked to-day, far and fast in the sun-warmed lanes, my thoughts came yapping and growling round me like a pack of curs—­undignified, troublesome, vexatious thoughts; I chase them away for a moment, and next moment they are snapping at my heels.  Experiences of a tragic quality, however depressing they may be, have a vaguely sustaining power about them, when they close in, as the fat bulls of Bashan closed in upon the Psalmist.  There is no escape then, and the matter is in the hands of God; but when many dogs have come about one, one feels that one must try to deal with the situation oneself; and that is just what one does not want to do.