oh, no, I did not yield!  I resisted,—­passively.  I laid hold upon the eternal fact that there was a God; the blind and blank universe spun about me; its pillars of support wavered like waterspouts; all that I had ever believed or loved whirled up and down in one howling chaos, and circled through all space in clouds of dust and floating atoms; but through all I knew there was a God,—­feel it I could not, neither did I see nor did one of Nature’s tongues spell me the lesson,—­I only knew it.  And I did not, no, I did not rush before Him; but I lay at the bottom of the river.

I have heard it said that drowning persons recall, as by a sudden omniscience, all their past lives, as soon as the water closes above them and the first shock of horror is past.  It was not so with me.  I remembered nothing beyond the events of the past week; but, by some strange action of the mind, as soon as the gasping sense of an unnatural element passed away, my thoughts went forward.  I became, as it were, another man; and above me on the bank I saw calmly the stone where my living double had left his cripple’s cane, and thought to myself for one sharp moment, “Fool!”—­for I looked forward. If I had not drowned, that was the key-note of the theme.  Something that was me and was not me rose up from the water-wall and went away,—­a man racked and broken by a great sorrow, it is true, but a man conscious of God.  Life had turned its darkest page for him, but there was the impassable fact that it was the darkest; no further depths remained to dread; the worst had come, and he looked it in the face and studied it; suffer he might, but with full knowledge of every agony.  Life had been wrecked, but living remained.  Calmly he took up the cripple’s cane and went home; the birds sang no song,—­after tempests they do not sing until the sun shines,—­neither did the blossoms give him any greeting.  Nature wastes no trivialities on such grief; the mother, whose child comes in to her broken-limbed and wounded, does not give it sugar-plums and kisses, but waits in silence till the surgeon has done his kindly and appalling office,—­then, it may be, she sings her boy to sleep!

But this man took up life again and conquered it.  Home grew about him into serenity and cheer; as from the roots of a felled tree a thousand verdant offshoots spring, tiny in stature, but fresh and vivid in foliage, so out of this beheaded love arose a crowd of sweet affections and tender services that made the fraternity of man seem possible, and illustrated the pervasive care of God.  He went out into life, and from a heart wrung with all man can endure, and a brain tested in the fire, spoke burning and fluent words of strength and consolation to hundreds who, like him, had suffered, but were sinking under what he had borne.  And these words carried in them a reviving virtue.  Men blessed him silently, and women sang him in their hearts as they sing hymns of prayer.  Honors clustered about him as mosses to a rock; Fame relented, and gave him an aureole in place of a crown; and Love, late, but sweeter than sweet, like the last sun-ripened fruit of autumn, made honors and fame alike endurable.  This man conquered, and triumphed in the victory.