"In order to the greatest happiness in this life," he said, "it is well freely to give to others all they shall require at your hands, being well assured that they will readily leave you in the enjoyment of that the only real possession of yours, which is your thoughts." To Idonia, who once asked him why he had never written down the rules he lived by, he answered with his grave smile that rules were the false scent, subtle or obvious, with which the escaping outlaw, thought, deludes its pursuers, sworn of the law. But the speech that hath struck the deepest in me was spoken when he gave Idonia, as he did, that picture of my mother, of whom he said (but not of himself) that she had known a world of sorrow, and after awhile added that "he believed ere she died she had found her sorrow fashioned to a splendid gift." I accurately remember the last day he lived, in every least accident of it: the sense of beauty that all things seemed to have above the ordinary, and the stillness that clung about the Combe. We had gone up, all three, and old Peter Sprot with us, to a little coppice of firs upon the moor side, to see a squadron of the Queen's ships, that went down the Channel under the command of Sir Richard Grenville, who was lately appointed to survey the defences of the West, and to marshal the trained bands that had been put into readiness against the expected, but long delayed, invasion of the Spanish. Our talk was naturally of war, and the chances we had to withstand so notable an army as was gathering against us, upon which my father said, very quiet, that the principal thing was never victory, but the not being afraid. Later on, as if pursuing a train of thought that this observation had set him on, he said-- "That which we are accustomed to call the future hath been by the elder men of all ages generally despaired of, or at the least feared; and I think it always will be so, for an old man's courage naturally turneth backward to the past and occupieth itself in enlarging the obstacles himself hath overcome, which no young man again might do; and this maketh him fearful, and oftentimes angry too." He paused there upon Idonia's pointing with her finger to the Admiral that just then shook out her standard from the mast-head, but presently proceeded, smiling: "Had England not already a motto to her shield I would petition the Heralds to subscribe these words beneath it, that in what estate so ever we be found, we be neither angry nor afraid." He sat silent after that, and I thought seemed to fetch his breath something uneasily. However, he lay back against the bole of a fir awhile as resting himself. "Of ourselves too," he went on at length, "I would have it written when we die, not that we did no wrong, for of none may that be said, but that as we entered into life without knowledge, so we departed from it without shame. For to be ashamed is to deny."