bless humanity.  Now I know all your difficulties and sorrows,—­I have worked among you, and lived among you—­and I feel the pulse of your existence beating in my own heart.  I know that when a great calamity overwhelms you all as it has done this week, you have no one to comfort you,—­no one to assure you that no matter how strange and impossible it seems, you have been deprived of your associates for some good cause which will be made manifest in due season,—­that they have probably been taken to save them from a worse fate than the loss of earth-consciousness in the sea.  For that, scientifically speaking, is all that death means—­the loss of earth-consciousness,- -but the gain of another consciousness, whether of another earth or a heaven none can say.  But there is no real death—­inasmuch as even a grain of dust in the air will generate life.  We must hold fast to the Soul of things—­the Soul which is immortal, not the body which is mortal.  ’What shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul!’ That is what each man of us must find, and hold, and keep,—­his own soul!  Apart from all creeds, and clergy, forms and rituals—­that is the vital matter.  Stand clear of all things,—­all alone if need be, surrounded by the stupendous forces of this great universe,—­let us find,—­each man of us—­his own soul; find and keep it brave, truthful, upright, and bound straight on for the highest,—­the highest always!  And the very stars in their courses will help us—­storms will but strengthen us—­difficulties but encourage us—­and death itself shall but give us larger liberty.”

He ceased, and one by one the men drew closer to him, and thanked him, in voices that were tremulous with the emotion he had raised in them.  The instinct which had led them to call him “Gentleman Leigh” had proved correct,—­and there was not a man among them all who did not feel a thrill of almost fraternal pride in the knowledge that the dauntless, hard-working “mate” who had fronted tempests with them, and worked with them in all weathers, had without any boast or loquacious preparation, made his name famous and fit for discussion in the great world of London far away, a world to which none of them had ever journeyed.  And they pressed round him and shook his hand, and gave him simple yet hearty words of cheer and goodwill, together with unaffected expressions of regret that he was leaving them,—­ “though for that matter,” said one of them, “we allus felt you was a scholard-like, for all that you was so handy at the nets.  For never did a bit of shell or weed come up from the sea but ye was a lookin’ at it as if God had throwed it to yer for particular notice.  And when a man takes to obsarvin’ common things as if they were special birthday presents from the Almighty, ye may be pretty sure there’s something out of the ordinary in him!”

Aubrey smiled, and pressed the hand of this roughly eloquent speaker,—­and then they all walked with him up from the shore to the little cottage where he had lived for so many months, and at the gate of which he bade them farewell.