Oh! what great thoughts and dark memories came into the mind of Moses Grant!  Great thoughts of a nobler life of love than he had ever known—­of realities to which he was fast approaching—­and a thousand dark memories that he had often tried to obliterate from his mind.  A little while before, he thought he possessed a spotless reputation—­and so he did possess a spotless reputation when judged by human law.  No man ever knew him to steal; no man ever knew him to transgress any important law.  Nevertheless, he had had his own ends to gain, and he had gained them.  Yes—­we might as well confess it—­Moses Grant had lived a selfish life.  He knew how to take advantage of the technicalities of law, and he knew how to be severe and unmerciful toward the poor.  He remembered how, years before, his son had longed for an education, and how the mother had pleaded that he might go to school and to college, and how sternly he said, ‘No, I want him in my business;’ and he remembered how he kept him slaving at his uncongenial tasks, how he scolded because he still pored over his books, until at last the mother had laid the poor boy in the grave before he had attained to manhood.  He remembered how the mother grew paler day by day—­she who had been such a help-meet in all his selfish schemes of hoarding and saving; how she had talked more and more about her ‘dear lost boy,’ till he, Moses Grant, commanded her never to utter that name again in his presence; how the mother still faded and faded, till at last she too, was laid in a quiet grave beside her boy.  All this came into the mind of Moses Grant.  And then he remembered how he had taken a poor widow’s cottage, because his mortgage-deed gave him the privilege—­he never thought the right—­to take it; he remembered her sad face, that told of silent suffering, when she moved with her children from the cottage her husband had built.  ‘How,’ he asked, in the silence of his own mind, ’oh! how could they say my reputation was unspotted?’ Yet he had transgressed no outward law, had forged no mortgage-deed.  He only acted like a man who thought that this world could only be enjoyed when he possessed a title-deed to it all; like one who thought that above and beyond this world there was nothing.

All this time has the Presence stood before Moses Grant, looking into his troubled face with its piercing eyes, and reading his every thought.

‘Answer me now,’ it said, ‘have you yet begun to live?’

Then there was another and greater struggle in the mind of Moses.  Pride said to him:  ‘Send this intrusive visitor away, or flee yourself.’  But still the visitor stood there, waiting so calmly, and again Moses realized that the great world had faded from his vision; so he could neither send away the intruder, nor fly himself.  Still those calm eyes looked into his inmost soul.

‘Oh!’ he cried at last, ’you have searched me through and through.  No, I have not lived—­I have not been born, I have no life for you to record in your book.  Now, pray leave me—­leave me in peace!’