’You who are so sympathetic will understand how my will has been affected by Father Moran’s visit.  Had you heard him tell how he was propelled, as it were, out of his house towards me, you, too, would believe that he was a messenger.  He stopped on his threshold to try to find a reason for coming to see me; he couldn’t find any, and he walked on, feeling that something had happened.  He must have thought himself a fool when he found me sitting here in the thick flesh.  But what he said did not seem nonsense to me; it seemed like some immortal wisdom come from another world.  Remember that I was on the point of going.  Nor is this all.  If nothing else had happened, I might have looked upon Father Moran’s visit as a coincidence.  But why should the wind rise?  So far as I can make out, it began to rise between eleven and twelve, at the very time I should have been swimming between Castle Island and the Joycetown shore.  I know that belief in signs and omens and prognostics can be laughed at; nothing is more ridiculous than the belief that man’s fate is governed by the flight of birds, yet men have believed in bird augury from the beginning of the world.

’I wrote to you about a curlew (I can still see it in the air, its beautifully shapen body and wings, its long beak, and its trailing legs; it staggered a little in its flight when the shot was fired, but it had strength enough to reach Castle Island:  it then toppled over, falling dead on the shore); and I ask you if it is wonderful that I should have been impressed?  Such a thing was never heard of before—­a wild bird with its legs tied together!

’At first I believed that this bird was sent to warn me from going, but it was that bird that put the idea into my head how I might escape from the parish without giving scandal.  Life is so strange that one doesn’t know what to think.  Of what use are signs and omens if the interpretation is always obscure?  They merely wring the will out of us; and well we may ask, Who would care for his life if he knew he was going to lose it on the morrow?  And what mother would love her children if she were certain they would fall into evil ways, or if she believed the soothsayers who told her that her children would oppose her ideas?  She might love them independent of their opposition, but how could she love them if she knew they were only born to do wrong?  Volumes have been written on the subject of predestination and freewill, and the truth is that it is as impossible to believe in one as in the other.  Nevertheless, prognostications have a knack of coming true, and if I am drowned crossing the lake you will be convinced of the truth of omens.  Perhaps I should not write you these things, but the truth is, I cannot help myself; there is no power of resistance in me.  I do not know if I am well or ill; my brain is on fire, and I go on thinking and thinking, trying to arrive at some rational belief, but never succeeding.  Sometimes I think of myself as a fly on a window-pane, crawling and buzzing, and crawling and buzzing again, and so on and so on....