The scanty audience that night witnessed a good performance of my brief, particular scene. Gilmour cursed and swore beneath his breath, but he was a smaller man than I was. He could do nothing with me. What was a shocking performance in one sense, was a realistic and sincere performance in another. Had my share of the pail been slightly bigger than it was, I should undoubtedly have “thrown” the prisoner and spoilt the curtain. As it was, however, Gilmour managed in the end to wrench the pistol from me, and in doing so, his fury genuine, he landed me a blow on the forehead with its heavy butt that stunned me. I fell. He fled. Roars of applause I heard dimly. My brown billycock hat, I remember, fell on its springy brim, bounced into the air, then hopped away against the footlights. And all my interest went with my precious hat. To the warders who at once rushed on with cries of “He’s escaped! Which way did he go?” I used the right words, taking my cue correctly. Only I pointed in the wrong direction. I pointed towards my old hat against the footlights. It lay outside the curtain. It is odd to think that somewhere in the under-mind of the individual who lay half-stunned on the stage of a Yonkers theatre, pointing wildly at a dilapidated, but precious, old brown billycock, slept a score of books, waiting patiently for expression a few years later. It is difficult, indeed, as I write these notes, to realize that the individual who describes the incidents is the individual who experienced them. The body itself has changed every single physical particle at least four times in succession. Nor is the mind the same. With the exception of one or two main interests, easily handed on by the outgoing atoms to the incoming atoms in the brain, “I” possess little that the “I” of those distant New York days possessed. Even the continuity of memory is bequeathable by atoms leaving the brain to the new ones just arriving. Where, then, is the self who experienced years ago what the self holding this pen now sets down? The “I,” during the next few years, at any rate, went rolling; rolling from one experience to another, if not cheerily, at least resignedly. Whatever happened--and what happened was mostly unpleasant--there was never absent the conviction that it was deserved, and must be lived out in a spirit of acceptance, until finally exhausted. Any other attitude toward unwelcome events meant evasion, and a disagreeable experience shirked merely postponed it to another time, either in this life or another. There was, meanwhile, a _real_ self that remained aloof, untouched, neither happy nor unhappy, a spectator, but a royal spectator. Into this eternal Self was gathered the fruit and essence of each and every experience the lower “I” passed through; the secret of living was to identify oneself with this exalted and untroubled royalty....