--dwindle to vanishing point. I used to be able to be sympathetic to the sorrows and troubles of almost everyone I met. I remember once after helping a man in this village to die comfortably, after sitting with him for hours and hours and hours during the progress of a most loathsome disease after closing his eyes, paying for his poor burial and doing all I could to console his widow and his daughters, that the widow and the daughters spoke bitterly about me and my wife--who had been so good to them--because one of our servants had returned the cream they sent to the kitchen because it was of inferior quality. These poor women actually made themselves unpleasant. For a day at least I was quite angry. It seemed so absolutely ungrateful when my wife and I had done everything for them for so long. But, I remember quite well, how I thought out the whole petty little incident one night when I was out with Tumpany after the wild geese. We were waiting in a cold midnight when scurrying clouds passed beneath the moon. It was bitter cold and my gun barrels burnt like fire. I thought it out with great care, and on the icy marshes a sort of understanding of narrow brains and unimaginative natures came to me. The next day I told my servants to still continue taking cream from the widow, and I have been friendly and kind to her ever since. But now, I can't possibly get into the mind of anyone else with sympathy. I think only of myself, of my own desires, of my own state. . . . * * * * * Although I doubt it in my heart of hearts, I must put it upon record that I still have a curious and ineradicable belief that I can, by a mere effort of volition, get rid of all the horrors that surround me and become good and normal once more. When I descend into the deepest depths of all I am yet conscious of a little jerky, comfortable, confidential nudge from something inside me. "You'll be all right," it says. "When you want to stop you will be able to all right!" This false confidence, though I know it to be utterly false, never deserts me in moments of exhilarated drunkenness. And finally, I add, that when my brain is becoming exhausted the last moment before stupor creeps over it, I constantly make the most supreme and picturesque pronunciations of my wickedness. I could not pray the words aloud--or at least if I did they would be somewhat tumbled and incoherent--but I mentally pray them. I wring my hands, I abase my soul and mind, I say the Pater Noster and the Credo, I stretch out my hot hands, and I give it all up for ever and ever and ever. I tumble into bed with a sigh of unutterable relief.