For I _do_ fear death, as I believe we all do in some moods. Notwithstanding our reiterated beliefs in Christ and in Immortality; notwithstanding our prayers, hymn-singing, and heartfelt declarations of our trust in God, and in His care for us, are there not moments in the life of each of us when the human nature within recoils in dumb and desolate protest from the thought of an existence in which the body will be left to decay? We think at such times of our own death and burial. We picture the mourning coaches setting out, with solemn pomp and pageantry of woe, to bear us away to our last earthly resting-place. We see them drive back--briskly now, and as though the grief were left behind with the coffin--to the darkened house, and we see the mourners alight and re-enter to draw up the blinds with a sigh of thinly-disguised satisfaction, and to turn with a natural if humiliating relief to life and the things of life again. And as we think of the darkness coming on, and of that deserted body of ours, which had once so craved for light and warmth and human companionship, lying, in the first awful night of desolation, away out under the sods in that dreary cemetery, we can almost fancy that we see the uneasy soul, restless even in heaven, stealing sadly to earth again, and hovering, for very companionship, over the forsaken mound that covers its ancient comrade. So, too, there are moments of midnight waking, when we lie on our bed as in a grave, and feel the awful thought of death borne in upon us with unutterable, intolerable horror. Then the darkness which shuts out those objects that in the day-time distract the attention of our outward eye, and of our mind, serves only to make our mental vision doubly keen, and to concentrate all our faculties, as to one inward focal point of light, on that hateful thought. Then do we seem to feel the earth rushing swiftly on its way, as if eager to hurry us to our own dissolution; and then do we stretch forth impotent hands and vain, striving hopelessly to stay it on its course. Yet ever is our striving of none avail: Death, hideous and inexorable, stares us in the face--a wall of vast and impenetrable night, which closes in upon us on every side. We gasp and choke as though some bony and cruel fingers lay clutching at our throat. "Is there no way," we cry, with heart strained unto bursting, "is there no way by which we may escape the Inescapable?--no loop-hole through which we may creep, and elude this black and grisly thing?" But from the hollow womb of night comes back the sullen answer, "Escape there is none," and then, like doomed criminals who snatch greedily at a day's reprieve, we thrust the ghastly thing away from us, and strive to distract our thoughts in folly. [Illustration] [Illustration] CHAPTER III. _DEALS WITH LIFE AND THE LUST OF IT, BUT HAS NO DIRECT BEARING ON MY STORY._[1]