Few of the busy toilers of the world will leave the firm sands to see so little; but sometimes one weary of keen life will stray aside, and oftener a child will come splashing across the beach to peer down with artless curiosity and delight. Then the jealous ocean returns, and the still clear depths are confused once more with refluent waters; soon the waves are tossing above the quiet spot, and the child is gone home to sleep and forget. I cannot have you with me at these still hours of revelation; I must tell my tale as best I can with such success as fortune may bestow. I shall say nothing of the miseries which embittered the life of the diffident boy. But I cannot pass in silence the deeper trouble of earliest manhood, when my soul first awoke to the dread that though other clouds might drift westward and dissolve, one would impend over me for ever. It was at the university that this vague misgiving crept upon me like a chill mist, until the hopes and aspirations of youth were one by one extinguished, as to a sailor putting out to sea the comfortable harbour lights vanish in the wracks of a tempestuous winter morning. I turned my face away from the gracious young life amidst which I moved, like a man possessed of a dark secret to his undoing. My heart, yet eager for the joy of living and yearning for affection, was daily starved of its need as by a power of deliberate and feline cruelty; and with every expansive impulse instantly restrained by this daemonic force, I was left at last unresponsive as a maltreated child, who flings his arms round no one, but shrinks back into his own world of solitary fancies. I think there is no misery so great as that of youth surrounded by all opportunities for wholesome fellowship, endowed with natural faculties for enjoyment, yet repressed and thwarted at every turn by invincible self-consciousness and mistrust: surely no lost opportunities of manhood leave such aching voids as these. In the spring-time of life to feel day by day the slow erosion of the power of joy is of all pains most poignant; out of it grow anxieties, premature despairs, incongruous with fresh cheeks and a mind not yet mature. This misery was mine for those four years which to most men are the happiest of a whole career, but to me at every retrospect seem so beset with gloomy shadows that could I live my life again, I would not traverse them once more for all the gold of Ophir.