“Am I then the slave of something that is not myself--something to which my fancied freedom and strength are a mockery? Was my courage, my peace, all the time dependent on something not me, which could be separated from me, and but a moment ago was separated from me, and left me as helplessly dismayed as the veriest coward in creation? I wonder what Alexander would have thought if, as he swung himself on Bucephalus, he had been taken as I was on the stair.” Afterwards, talking the thing over with Mr Graham, he said: “I saw that I had no hand in my own courage. If I had any courage, it was simply that I was born with it. If it left me, I could not help it: I could neither prevent nor recall it; I could only wait until it returned. Why, then, I asked myself, should I feel ashamed that, for five minutes, as I sat on the stair, Kelpie was a terror to me, and I felt as if I dared not go near her? I had almost reached the stable before I saw into it a little. Then I did see that if I had had nothing to do with my own courage, it was quite time I had something to do with it. If a man had no hand in his own nature, character, being, what could he be better than a divine puppet--a happy creature, possibly--a heavenly animal, like the grand horses and lions of the book of the Revelation--but not one of the gods that the sons of God, the partakers of the divine nature, are? For this end came the breach in my natural courage-- that I might repair it from the will and power God had given me, that I might have a hand in the making of my own courage, in the creating of myself. Therefore I must see to it.” Nor had he to wait for his next lesson, namely, the opportunity of doing what he had been taught in the first. For just as he reached the stable, where he heard Kelpie clamouring with hoofs and teeth, after her usual manner when she judged herself neglected, the sickness returned, and with it such a fear of the animal he heard thundering and clashing on the other side of the door, as amounted to nothing less than horror. She was a man-eating horse!--a creature with bloody teeth, brain-spattered hoofs, and eyes of hate! A flesh-loving devil had possessed her and was now crying out for her groom that he might devour him. He gathered, with agonized effort, every power within him to an awful council, and thus he said to himself: “Better a thousand times my brain plastered the stable-wall than I should hold them in the head of a dastard. How can God look at me with any content if I quail in the face of his four-footed creature! Does he not demand of me action according to what I _know_, not what I may chance at any moment to _feel_? God is my strength, and I will lay hold of that strength and use it, or I have none, and Kelpie may take me and welcome.”