behind him, may be as sad and hopeless as he who sits down and weeps before the mountain of untried beginnings. The joy of the earthly future is for the very great and the very little. For as charity leads mankind by faith to the hope of the life to come, so, on the mind's side, by faith in its own strength, the work of genius in the past is its own surety for like work to come. Gilbert Warde was not of that great mould, but more human and less sure of himself; and suddenly, as the sun went down, a strong desire of death came upon him, and he wished that he were dead and buried under the grass whereon he stood, for very discontent with himself. It would be so simple, and none would mourn him much, except his men, perhaps, and they would part his few possessions and serve another. He was a burden to the earth, since he could do nothing well; he was a coward, because he was afraid of a woman's eyes and had fled from their gaze like a boy; he was a sinner deserving eternal fire since a touch of a fair woman's hand could make him unfaithful for an instant to the one woman he loved best. He had meant to tread the way of the Cross in true faith, with unswerving feet, and his heart was the toy of women; he had sworn the promises of knighthood, and he was already breaking them in his thoughts; he was his evil mother's son, and he had not the strength to be unlike her. It was folly and madness, and Castignac, the Gascon knight, would have laughed at him, or else would have believed that he was demented. But to the Englishman it was real, for he was under that strange melancholy which only Northmen know, and which is the most real suffering in all the world. It is a dim sadness that gathers like a cloud about strong men's souls, and they fear it, and sometimes kill themselves to escape from it into the outer darkness beyond; but sometimes it drives them to bad deeds and the shedding of innocent blood, and now and then the better sort of such men turn from the world and hide themselves in the abodes of sorrow and pain and prayer. The signs of it are that when it has no cause it seizes upon trifles to make them its reasons, and more often it torments young men than the old; and no woman nor southern person has ever known it, nor can even understand it. But it follows the northern blood from generation to generation, like retribution for an evil without a name done long ago by the northern race.