You must fight in it; money will buy you no discharge from that war.  There is room in it, believe me, whether your post be on a judge’s bench, or over a wash-tub, for heroism, for knightly honor, for purer triumph than his who falls foremost in the breach.  Your enemy, Self, goes with you from the cradle to the coffin; it is a hand-to-hand struggle all the sad, slow way, fought in solitude,—­a battle that began with the first heart-beat, and whose victory will come only when the drops ooze out, and sudden halt in the veins,—­a victory, if you can gain it, that will drift you not a little way upon the coasts of the wider, stronger range of being, beyond death.

Let me roughly outline for you one or two lives that I have known, and how they conquered or were worsted in the fight.  Very common lives, I know,—­such as are swarming in yonder market-place; yet I dare to call them voices of God,—­all!

My reason for choosing this story to tell you is simple enough.

An old book, which I happened to find to-day, recalled it.  It was a ledger, iron-bound, with the name of the firm on the outside,—­Knowles & Co.  You may have heard of the firm:  they were large woollen manufacturers:  supplied the home market in Indiana for several years.  This ledger, you see by the writing, has been kept by a woman.  That is not unusual in Western trading towns, especially in factories where the operatives are chiefly women.  In such establishments, women can fill every post successfully, but that of overseer:  they are too hard with the hands for that.

The writing here is curious:  concise, square, not flowing,—­very legible, however, exactly suited to its purpose.  People who profess to read character in chirography would decipher but little from these cramped, quiet lines.  Only this, probably:  that the woman, whoever she was, had not the usual fancy of her sex for dramatizing her soul in her writing, her dress, her face,—­kept it locked up instead, intact; that her words and looks, like her writing, were most likely simple, mere absorbents by which she drew what she needed of the outer world to her, not flaunting helps to fling herself, or the tragedy or comedy that lay within, before careless passers-by.  The first page has the date, in red letters, October 2, 1860, largely and clearly written.  I am sure the woman’s hand trembled a little when she took up the pen; but there is no sign of it here; for it was a new, desperate adventure to her, and she was young, with no faith in herself.  She did not look desperate, at all,—­a quiet, dark girl, coarsely dressed in brown.