Do not hope you are to gain the victory in a day. It may take months. It may take years. Inch by inch, and step by step, the battle must be fought. Over and over again you will be worsted and give ground, but do not therefore yield. Resolve never to be driven back quite so far as you have advanced. Imperceptibly, the foe becomes weaker, while you are gaining strength. The time will come at last, when you can look back on the struggle with a half-pitying wonder that he could ever have made so good a fight. Do not then forget to be grateful for the aid you prayed so earnestly might be granted at your need; and remember also, for your comfort, that the harder won the victory, the less likely it is you will ever have to wage such cruel battle again. “Would it not be wiser,” observed Bones quietly, “never to begin the conflict? Not to take possession of the haunted house at all?” There is a pseudo-philosophy about some of his remarks that provokes me intensely. “Would it not be wiser,” I repeated, in high disdain, “to sit on the beach than put out to sea, to walk afoot than ride on horseback, to loll on velvet cushions in the gallery, than go down under shield into the lists, and strike for life, honour, and renown? No. It would _not_ be wiser. True wisdom comes by experience. He who shrinks from contact with his fellow-men—who fears to take his share of their burdens, their sorrows, their sufferings, is but a poor fool at best. He may be learned in the learning of the schools, but he is a dunce in all that relates to ‘the proper study of mankind’; he is ignorant of human nature, its sorrows, its passions, its feelings, its hidden vein of gold, lying under a thick crust of selfishness and deceit; above all, he knows nothing of his inmost heart, nothing of the fierce, warlike joy in which a bold spirit crushes and tramples out its own rebellion—nothing of that worshipper’s lofty courage who ‘Gives the first watch of the night To the red planet Mars,’ who feels a stern and dogged pride in the consciousness that he ‘Knows how sublime a thing it is To suffer and be strong.’ No: in the moral as in the physical battle, though you be pinned to the earth, yet writhe yourself up against the spear, like the ‘grim Lord of Colonsay,’ who, in his very death-pang, swung his claymore, set his teeth, and drove his last blow home.