forgetfulness, anodyne, courage until the spirit that has tricked the brain has gone, until the travail that has worn the soul has ebbed. Back then to fear, to baseness, as surely as night succeeds to day.... "What then? What do I purpose? What have I to offer? Lord, there is only this in me that is different: that my eyes are opened to that to which all my life they have been sealed. I have nothing to promise, nothing to vow. I have only to ask: Keep my eyes open; help me to remember this that my eyes have seen; help me to know what is self; help me to rid me of it. All my life--all my life from the beginning it has been self. Back in the London days when I was working day and night, when I was longing to be free, when I thought I was giving up my life to others, it was all self, self that was destroying me. It was not ceaseless work that wrought upon my peace of mind, robbed me of my youth; it was pitying myself, thinking of myself, contrasting my lot with that of others. It is not work nor trouble that kills a man, robs him of sleep, loses him his happiness--it is turning the stress of it inwards upon himself, never forgetting himself when occupied with it, always keeping himself before his eyes, watching himself, pitying himself. Brida knew it. 'You think too much about yourself, Phil,' she used to tell me. That old Puddlebox had the secret of it and told it me plainly. 'You think too much about yourself, boy, and that is what's the matter with you and with most of us.' He told it to me plainly. 'I don't believe a word of it,' he told me when he had heard my story. 'Your story is the same as my story and the same as everybody else's story in this way: that you've never done any thing wrong in all your life, and that all that's happened to you is what other folk have put upon you.' Ay, that was it! I thought I was sacrificing my life; I was grudging every thought of it, every moment of it given away from my own pursuits. How could I be sacrificing when in doing so I was unhappy? That is negation in terms. To sacrifice is happiness. Old Puddlebox showed it me. This my Essie showed it me. To give--to give time, money, life itself, and have compassion for oneself in giving them, that is the very pit of self, worse than self open and wilful. That is the selfishness that all my life has been my curse, my wreckage. All that ever has happened to me I have seen in terms of myself and of no other. Every trouble, every irritation that in those London days those poor things about me brought to me, I at once turned upon myself--looked at with my eyes, not with theirs; thought instantly and always, even while I helped them, how it affected me, not how it affected them. Ah, that is the heart of misery and that is the secret of happiness! To see only with one's own eyes, to judge only from one's own point, to estimate life in terms of self and of no other: that is to goad oneself on from trial to trial, from misery to misery.