upon its heart, thereafter to be revealed by the hewing axe and the persistent saw. No! I sat by the river and looked down into its dark serenity, and again the horror of the past day swept over me with fresh force. Could I live? The unswerving river lay before me; in its bed nothing stirred; neither pang nor passion in those chill depths could utter a cry; there she could not come; there was rest. I did not yield; oh, no, I did not yield! I resisted,--passively. I laid hold upon the eternal fact that there was a God; the blind and blank universe spun about me; its pillars of support wavered like waterspouts; all that I had ever believed or loved whirled up and down in one howling chaos, and circled through all space in clouds of dust and floating atoms; but through all I knew there was a God,--feel it I could not, neither did I see nor did one of Nature's tongues spell me the lesson,--I only knew it. And I did not, no, I did not rush before Him; but I lay at the bottom of the river. I have heard it said that drowning persons recall, as by a sudden omniscience, all their past lives, as soon as the water closes above them and the first shock of horror is past. It was not so with me. I remembered nothing beyond the events of the past week; but, by some strange action of the mind, as soon as the gasping sense of an unnatural element passed away, my thoughts went forward. I became, as it were, another man; and above me on the bank I saw calmly the stone where my living double had left his cripple's cane, and thought to myself for one sharp moment, "Fool!"--for I looked forward. _If I had not drowned_, that was the key-note of the theme. Something that was me and was not me rose up from the water-wall and went away,--a man racked and broken by a great sorrow, it is true, but a man conscious of God. Life had turned its darkest page for him, but there was the impassable fact that it was the darkest; no further depths remained to dread; the worst had come, and he looked it in the face and studied it; suffer he might, but with full knowledge of every agony. Life had been wrecked, but living remained. Calmly he took up the cripple's cane and went home; the birds sang no song,--after tempests they do not sing until the sun shines,--neither did the blossoms give him any greeting. Nature wastes no trivialities on such grief; the mother, whose child comes in to her broken-limbed and wounded, does not give it sugar-plums and kisses, but waits in silence till the surgeon has done his kindly and appalling office,--then, it may be, she sings her boy to sleep!