It is not always when we tell ourselves that we are well off that we are happiest:  that self-addressed assertion often implies some tacit contradiction.

When darkness came he wondered if he should put on his snow-shoes and run over to Turrifs.  Yet for some reason he did not go, in the way that men so often do not do things that they think on the whole would be very good things to do.  An hour or two later he knew that the good people there would have gone to bed and that he had no longer the option of going.  He did not go to bed himself.  He had not had enough exercise that day to make him sleepy; and then, too, he thought he would sit up and see the old year out.  He had an indistinct idea that it was rather a virtuous thing to do, rather more pious than sleeping the night through just as if it were any other night.  He put his much-handled, oft-read books down before him on the table, and set himself to passing the evening with them.  Midnight is actually midnight when the sun goes down before five o’clock and there is no artificial interest for the after hours.

Most men have more religion at heart, latent or developed, than can be seen by others.  When they have not, when what shows is as much as what is—­God pity them!

Alec Trenholme was not given to self-dissection or to expression of his private sentiments, therefore neither to himself nor to others was the religion of him very visible.  Nevertheless, this evening his books, which had become not less but more to him because he had read them often, palled upon his taste.  When he was a boy his father had taught him that at New Year’s time one ought to consider whether the past had been spent well, and how the future could be spent better.  So, as time went on, he pushed his books further and set himself to this consideration.  For a while he sat looking at his own doings only by the light, as it were, of two candles—­the one, of expediency; the other, of rectitude.  Had he been wise?  Had he been good?

Not being of a contemplative or egotistical disposition, he soon fidgeted.  Thinking he heard a sound outside, which might be wind rising, or might be the distant approach of the iron snow-plough, he got up to look out.  The small panes of his window were so obscured by frostwork that he did not attempt to look through the glass, but opened his door.  Far or near there was no sign of rising wind or coming engine; only, above, the glowing stars, with now and then a shaft of northern light passing majestically beneath them, and, below, the great white world, dim, but clearly seen as it reflected the light.  The constellations attracted his attention.  There hung Orion, there the Pleiades, there those mists of starlight which tell us of space and time of which we cannot conceive.  Standing, looking upwards, he suddenly believed himself to be in the neighbourhood of God.