some benign power held back my desperate hand; once, indeed, I tried to force the gates of death by an attempt to take my own life, but, heaven be forever praised!  I did not succeed, for the knife refused to cut as deep as I would have had it.  I thought I would be justifiable in throwing off by any means such a load of horror and pain as I was weighed down with.  Who would not escape from misery if he could?  I argued.  If the grave, self-sought, would hide every error, blot out every pang, and shield from every storm, why not seek it?

They have in certain lands of the tropics a game which the people are said to watch with absorbing interest.  It is this:  A scorpion is caught.  With cruel eagerness the boys and girls of the street assemble and place the reptile on a board, surrounded with a rim of tow saturated with some inflammable spirit.  This ignited, the torture of the scorpion begins.  Maddened by the heat, the detested thing approaches the fiery barrier and attempts to find some passage of escape, but vain the endeavor!  It retreats toward the center of the ring, and as the heat increases and it begins to writhe under it, the children cry out with pleasure—­a cry in which, I fancy, there is a cadence of the sound which sends a thrill of delight through hell—­the sound of exultation which rises from the tongues of bigots when the martyr’s soul mounts upward from the flames in which his body is consumed.  Again the scorpion attempts to escape, and again it is turned back by that impassable barrier of fire.  The shouts of the children deepen.  At last, finding that there is no way by which to fly, the hated thing retreats to the center of its flaming prison and stings itself to death.  Then it is that the exultation of the crowd of cruel tormentors is most loudly expressed.  But do not infer from what I have said that I look with favor on suicide under any circumstances.  That I do not do, but I would have you look at society and some of its victims.

See what barriers of flame are often thrown around poor, despairing, miserable men!  Listen to that indifference and condemnation, and this wail of agony!  Can you wonder that the outcast abandons hope and plunges the knife into his heart?  He is driven to madness, and feeling that all is lost, he commits an act which does indeed lose everything for him, for it bars the gates of heaven against him.  Before he had nothing on earth; now he has nothing in paradise.  Alas for those who triumph over the fall of a fellow creature.  God have mercy on those who exult over the wretchedness of a victim of alcohol!  Woe to those who ridicule his efforts to escape, and who mock him when he fails.  Do they not help to shape for him the dagger of self-destruction?  What ingredients of poison do they not mix with the fatal drink which deprives him of breath?  With what threads do they strengthen the rope with which he hangs himself!  Where should the most blame rest, where does it most rest in the eyes of God—­with