IT is a friendly ordering of the world that the episodes of each man’s life come to him with so vivid a freshness that his own experience (which is nothing but the experience of all his fellows) might be unique in the history of the race. Providence is but an unskilful strategist, and having contrived one scheme to fill the three-score years and ten, she keeps a man to it, regardless of his disposition and of his desires. Sometimes, indeed, he forces her hand, wresting from her here a little more of power, there a sweeter burst of romance, making her blow a louder peal of warrior trumpets to herald him, and beat a longer roll of drums when he departs; sometimes he outwits her, dying before he has completed the task she set him, or disturbing her calculations by his obstinate vitality. But for the most part he is content to obey, and the familiar story takes its course until death abruptly closes the chapter, and sends the little universe of his deeds to roll unevenly down the centuries, balanced or unbalanced as he left it, with no hand more to modify its course. Familiar and yet never monotonous--though wherever you turn the air is full of memories everywhere the same, though the page of every historian repeats the same tale, though every poet sighs over it, and every human being on the earth lives it over again in his own person. A man will not complain of the want of originality; he is more likely to be cheered when he looks round him and sees his fellows suffering and rejoicing in like manner with himself, when he looks back and sees his predecessors absorbed by the same cares, urged forward by the same hopes. The experience of those who have passed before him along the well-trodden road will not hold him back or turn him aside; to each newcomer the way is new and still to be enjoyed--new and exciting the dangers and the difficulties, new the pleasant sensation of rest by the fountain at mid-day, new and terrible the hunger and the foot-soreness, new, with a grim unexpectedness, the forbidding aspect of that last caravanserai where he lays himself down to sleep out the eternal night. Yes, Death is newest of all and least considered in the counsels of men--Death, who comes silent-footed at all moments, who brushes us with his sleeve as he passes us by, who plucks us warningly by the cloak lest we should forget his presence--he, too, will surprise us at the last. And if it were not so, small pleasure would be reaped from life. If the past were to stand for ever holding a mirror of the future before his eyes, many a man would refuse to venture forward--it is upon the unknown that he lays his trust--and if the universal presence of death had but once found a lodging in his mind, the whole world would seem to him to be but one vast graveyard, the cheerful fields but a covering for dead men’s bones, and the works of their hands but as tombstones under which the dead hands lie.