placed me where I am, something urges me along; there is a will behind me, I am sure of that.  But I do not know whether that will is just or unjust, kind or unkind, benevolent or indifferent.  I have had much happiness and great prosperity, but I have had to bear also things which are inconceivably repugnant to me, things which seem almost satanically adapted to hurt and wound me in my tenderest and innermost feelings, trials which seem to be concocted with an almost infernal appropriateness, not things which I could hope to bear with courage and faith, but things which I can only endure with rebellious resistance.”  “Yes,” he said, “I understand you perfectly; but does not their very appropriateness, the satanical ingenuity of which you speak, help you to feel that they are not fortuitous, but sent deliberately to you yourself and to none other?” “Yes,” I said, “I see that; but how can I believe in the justice of a discipline which I could not inflict, I will not say upon a dearly loved child, but upon the most relentless and stubborn foe.”  “Ah,” said he, “now I see your heart bare, the very palpitating beat of the blood.  Do you think you are alone in this?  Let me tell you my own story.  Over fifty years ago I left Oxford with, I really think I may say, almost everything before me—­everything, that is, which is open to an instinctively cheerful, temperate, capable, active man—­ I was not rich, but I could afford to wait to earn money.  I was sociable and popular; I was endowed with an immense appetite for variety of experience; I don’t think that there was anything which appeared to me to be uninteresting.  But I could persevere too, I could stick to work, I had taken a good degree.  Then an accidental fall off a chair, on which I was standing to get a book, laid me on my back for a time.  I fretted over it at first, but when I got about again, I found that I was a man maimed for life.  I don’t know what the injury was—­some obscure lesion of the spinal marrow or brain, I believe—­some flaw about the size of a pin’s head—­the doctors have never made out.  But every time that I plunged into work, I broke down; for a long time I thought I should struggle through; but at last I became aware that I was on the shelf, with other cracked jars, for life—­I can’t tell you what I went through, what agonies of despair and rebellion.  I thought that at least literature was left me.  I had always been fond of books, and was a good scholar, as it is called; but I soon became aware that I had no gift of expression, and moreover that I could not hope to acquire it, because any concentrated effort threw me into illness.  I was an ambitious fellow, and success was closed to me—­I could not even hope to be useful.  I tried several things, but always with the same result; and at last I fell into absolute despair, and just lived on, praying daily and even hourly that I might die.  But I did not die, and then at last it dawned upon me, like a lightening sunrise, that this was life for