I held out my hand in that water and touched—­a skeleton!  What! had any other man preceded me?  I looked at it; it was the water-washed frame of a horse,—­brutes together!  And death was at hand; the grasp tightened on my breast with that acrid sense of weight and suffocation that the redundant blood suffusing the lungs must needs produce.  “The soul of the brute goeth downward.”  Coward! what might not life have been? and I had lost it!—­lost it for the sting of a honey-bee!—­for the contempt of a woman!  Every magnificent possibility, every immortal power, every hope of a future, tantalizing in its grand mystery, all lost!  What if that sweeping star-seraph that men call a comet, speeding through heaven in its lonely splendor, with nitent head, and pinions trailing with the very swiftness and strength of its onward flight, should shudder from its orbit, fling into star-strewn space its calm and awful glory, and go crashing down into the fury and blackness of chaos, carrying with it wrecks of horror, and the yelling fragments of spheres no longer choral, but smitten with the lawless stroke of a creature regardless of its Creator, an orb that made its solitary fate, and carried across the order and the law of God ruin and wreck embodied?

And I had a soul;—­I had flung it away; I had set my will up for my destiny, and the one had worked out the other.  But had I?  When that devilish suggestion came to me on the bank, did I entertain it?  Have I not said how I grasped at the great idea of a God, and held it with a death-gripe in the midst of assault?  How did I come in the water?  I did not plunge nor fall.  No shock of horror chilled me; no remembrance of a voluntary assent to the Tempter could I recall.  I was there, it was true; but was I guilty?  Did I, in the eyes of any watching angel, consciously cast my life, brittle and blind as it was, away in that fashion?  In the water, helpless now for any effort after upper air, side by side with the fleshless anatomy of a brute, over-sailed by gray fishes with speckled sides, whose broad, unwinking eyes glared at me with maddening shine and stare,—­oppressed, and almost struggling, yet all unable to achieve the struggle with the curdling blood that gorged every vein and air-cell with the hurried rush of death,—­did I go out of this life red with the sin of murder?  Did I commit suicide?

Who knows?

* * * * *

THE MINISTER’S WOOING.

[Continued.]

CHAPTER VI.

THE DOCTOR.

It is seldom that man and woman come together in intimate association, unless influences are at work more subtile and mysterious than the subjects of them dream.  Even in cases where the strongest ruling force of the two sexes seems out of the question, there is still something peculiar and insidious in their relationship.  A fatherly old gentleman, who undertakes the care of a sprightly young girl, finds, to his astonishment, that little Miss spins all sorts of cobwebs round him.  Grave professors and teachers cannot give lessons to their female pupils just as they give them to the coarser sex, and more than once has the fable of “Cadenus and Vanessa” been acted over by the most unlikely performers.