I will only add that the book is all based upon an intense belief in God, and a no less intense conviction of personal immortality and personal responsibility.  It aims at bringing out the fact that our life is a very real pilgrimage to high and far-off things from mean and sordid beginnings, and that the key of the mystery lies in the frank facing of experience, as a blessed process by which the secret purpose of God is made known to us; and, even more, in a passionate belief in Love, the love of friend and neighbour, and the love of God; and in the absolute faith that we are all of us, from the lowest and most degraded human soul to the loftiest and wisest, knit together with chains of infinite nearness and dearness, under God, and in Him, and through Him, now and hereafter and for evermore.

A.C.B.

The old lodge, Magdalene college, Cambridge, January, 1912.

The Child of the Dawn

I

Certainly the last few moments of my former material, worn-out life, as I must still call it, were made horrible enough for me.  I came to, after the operation, in a deadly sickness and ghastly confusion of thought.  I was just dimly conscious of the trim, bare room, the white bed, a figure or two, but everything else was swallowed up in the pain, which filled all my senses at once.  Yet surely, I thought, it is all something outside me? ... my brain began to wander, and the pain became a thing.  It was a tower of stone, high and blank, with a little sinister window high up, from which something was every now and then waved above the house-roofs....  The tower was gone in a moment, and there was a heap piled up on the floor of a great room with open beams—­a granary, perhaps.  The heap was of curved sharp steel things like sickles:  something moved and muttered underneath it, and blood ran out on the floor.  Then I was instantly myself, and the pain was with me again; and then there fell on me a sense of faintness, so that the cold sweat-drops ran suddenly out on my brow.  There came a smell of drugs, sharp and pungent, on the air.  I heard a door open softly, and a voice said, “He is sinking fast—­they must be sent for at once.”  Then there were more people in the room, people whom I thought I had known once, long ago; but I was buried and crushed under the pain, like the thing beneath the heap of sickles.  There swept over me a dreadful fear; and I could see that the fear was reflected in the faces above me; but now they were strangely distorted and elongated, so that I could have laughed, if only I had had the time; but I had to move the weight off me, which was crushing me.  Then a roaring sound began to come and go upon the air, louder and louder, faster and faster; the strange pungent scent came again; and then I was thrust down under the weight, monstrous, insupportable; further and further down; and there came a sharp bright streak, like a blade severing the strands of a rope drawn taut and tense; another and another; one was left, and the blade drew near....