was this only the aimless startled cry of a solitary man confronted by his fate?  “An awful thing has happened,” he wrote before he flung the pen down for the first time; look at the ink blot resembling the head of an arrow under these words.  After a while he had tried again, scrawling heavily, as if with a hand of lead, another line.  “I must now at once . . .”  The pen had spluttered, and that time he gave it up.  There’s nothing more; he had seen a broad gulf that neither eye nor voice could span.  I can understand this.  He was overwhelmed by the inexplicable; he was overwhelmed by his own personality—­the gift of that destiny which he had done his best to master.

’I send you also an old letter—­a very old letter.  It was found carefully preserved in his writing-case.  It is from his father, and by the date you can see he must have received it a few days before he joined the Patna.  Thus it must be the last letter he ever had from home.  He had treasured it all these years.  The good old parson fancied his sailor son.  I’ve looked in at a sentence here and there.  There is nothing in it except just affection.  He tells his “dear James” that the last long letter from him was very “honest and entertaining.”  He would not have him “judge men harshly or hastily.”  There are four pages of it, easy morality and family news.  Tom had “taken orders.”  Carrie’s husband had “money losses.”  The old chap goes on equably trusting Providence and the established order of the universe, but alive to its small dangers and its small mercies.  One can almost see him, grey-haired and serene in the inviolable shelter of his book-lined, faded, and comfortable study, where for forty years he had conscientiously gone over and over again the round of his little thoughts about faith and virtue, about the conduct of life and the only proper manner of dying; where he had written so many sermons, where he sits talking to his boy, over there, on the other side of the earth.  But what of the distance?  Virtue is one all over the world, and there is only one faith, one conceivable conduct of life, one manner of dying.  He hopes his “dear James” will never forget that “who once gives way to temptation, in the very instant hazards his total depravity and everlasting ruin.  Therefore resolve fixedly never, through any possible motives, to do anything which you believe to be wrong.”  There is also some news of a favourite dog; and a pony, “which all you boys used to ride,” had gone blind from old age and had to be shot.  The old chap invokes Heaven’s blessing; the mother and all the girls then at home send their love. . . .  No, there is nothing much in that yellow frayed letter fluttering out of his cherishing grasp after so many years.  It was never answered, but who can say what converse he may have held with all these placid, colourless forms of men and women peopling that quiet corner of the world as free of danger or strife as a tomb, and breathing equably the air of undisturbed rectitude.  It