but there were terrible hereditary influences at work, and I cannot honestly say that I think he was wholly responsible for his sins.  If I could think that this act was done reasonably, in a solemn and recollected spirit, and was not a mere frightened scurrying out of life, I should be, I believe, wholly glad.  I do not see that any one had anything to gain by his continuing to live; and if reason is given us to use, to guide our actions by, it seems to me that we do right to obey it.  Suicide may, of course, be a selfish and a cowardly thing, but the instinct of self-preservation is so strong that a man must always manifest a certain courage in making such a decision.  The sacrifice of one’s own life is not necessarily and absolutely an immoral thing, because it is always held to be justified if one’s motive is to save another.  It is purely, I believe, a question of motive; whatever poor Dick’s motives were, it was certainly the kindest and bravest thing that he could do; and I look upon his life as having been as naturally ended as if he had died of disease or by an accident.  There is not a single one of his friends who would not have been thankful if he had died in the course of nature; and I for one am even more thankful as it is, because it seems to me that his act testifies to some tenderness, some consideration for others, as well as to a degree of resolution with which I had not credited him.

Of course such a thing deepens the mystery of the world; but such an act as this is not to me half as mysterious as the action of an omnipotent Power which allowed so bright and gracious a creature as Dick was long ago to drift into ugly, sordid, and irreparable misery.  Yet it seems to me now that Dick has at last trusted God completely, made the last surrender, and put his miserable case in the Father’s hands.

December 2, 1888.

As I came home to-night, moving slowly westward along deserted roads, among wide and solitary fields, in the frosty twilight, I passed a great pale fallow, in the far corner of which, beside a willow-shaded stream, a great heap of weeds was burning, tended by a single lonely figure raking in the smouldering pile.  A dense column of thick smoke came volleying from the heap, that went softly and silently up into the orange-tinted sky; some forty feet higher the smoke was caught by a moving current of air; much of it ascended higher still, but the thin streak of moving wind caught and drew out upon itself a long weft of aerial vapour, that showed a delicate blue against the rose-flushed west.  The long lines of leafless trees, the faint outlines of the low distant hills, seemed wrapped in meditative silence, dreaming wistfully, as the earth turned her broad shoulder to the night, and as the forlorn and chilly sunset faded by soft degrees on the horizon.  As the day thus died, the frost made itself felt, touching the hedgerows with rime, and crisping the damp road beneath my feet.  The end drew on with a mournful solemnity; but the