not understand it.  The pain seemed disproportionate to the sin; but he could not resist the repugnance and horror with which it filled him!  And this is an element in the moral life with which bad men forget to deal!  Because conscience ceases to remonstrate and remorse to torment, they think the exemption permanent.  They do not know that at any moment, in some unforeseen emergency—­this abused faculty of the soul may spring into renewed life.  This elemental power, this primal endowment, can no more be permanently dissociated from the soul than heat from fire!  It may smoulder unobserved, but a breath will fan it into flame!  Without it, the soul would cease to be a soul; its permanent eradication would be equivalent to annihilation!  If conscience can be eliminated, man has nothing to brag of over a tadpole!  We are no more safe from it than from memory!  Who can be sure that what he has forgotten has ceased to survive?  The sweet perfume of a violet may revive a bitter memory dormant for fifty years!  At a word, a look, a glance, conscience—­abused, suppressed, despised, inoperative—­may rise in all her majesty and fill the heart with torment and despair!

This corrupted judge, this faithless lover, this dishonorable parent, had become accustomed to dull misery; but this fierce onslaught of an avenging sense of personal unworthiness and dread of divine justice was more than he could bear.  Life had long since lost its charms and he had more than once seriously contemplated suicide.

“There seems to be no use in trying to beat nature in any other way, and so I will try the dernier resort,” he said aloud.  Opening his pocket knife, he cut a piece of rope from the flagstaff, looked around, found a heavy bar of iron, and fastened rope and weight together.  In one end of the rope he made a noose, slipped it over his neck, approached the railing and leaned upon it to reflect.  His mind now went back into the still more remote past; he was a boy again, and at his mother’s knee.  Half audibly and half unconsciously, he began murmuring, “Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray—­no—­I’ll be consistent,” he added, with a sigh.  “I have lived without the mummery of prayer, and I will die without it.”

And then by one of those strange freaks of the mind that make people do the most absurd things at the most sacred times—­mourners laugh at funerals, and soldiers in the thick of battles long for puddings—­he began to say over that old doggerel which he used to repeat when shivering on the spring-board over the cold waters of the Hudson river: 

     “One, two, three, the bumble bee,
     The rooster crows and away she goes!”

The absurdity of so trivial a memory at such a serious moment excited his sense of humor, and he smiled.

By this time the violence of his remorse had begun to subside and proved to be only a fitful, fleeting protest of that abused and neglected moral sense.  Something more terrible than even this discovery of the wrong done to his own son would have to come.  There was plenty of time!  Nature was in no haste!  This was only a warning, a little danger signal.