ead for you.

_June, 1889._

_LOST DAYS._

I fully recognize the fact which the Frenchman flippantly stated--that
no human beings really believe that death is inevitable until the last
clasp of the stone-cold king numbs their pulses. Perhaps this
insensibility is a merciful gift; at any rate, it is a fact. If belief
came home with violence to our minds, we should suffer from a sort of
vertigo; but the merciful dullness which the Frenchman perceived and
mocked in his epigram saves us all the miseries of apprehension. This is
very curiously seen among soldiers when they know that they must soon go
into action. The soldiers chat together on the night before the attack;
they know that some of them must go down; they actually go so far as to
exchange messages thus--"If anything happens to me, you know, Bill, I
want you to take that to the old people. You give me a note or anything
else you have; and, if we get out of the shindy, we can hand the things
back again." After confidences of this sort, the men chat on; and I
never yet knew or heard of one who did not speak of his own safe return
as a matter of course. When a brigade charges, there may be a little
anxiety at first; but the whistle of the first bullet ends all
misgivings, and the fellows grow quite merry, though it may be that half
of them are certain to be down on the ground before the day is over. A
man who is struck may know well that he will pass away: but he will
rise up feebly to cheer on his comrades--nay, he will ask questions, as
the charging troops pass him, as to the fate of Bill or Joe, or the
probable action of the Heavies, or similar trifles.

In the fight of life we all behave much as the soldiers do in the crash
and hurry of battle. If we reason the matter out with a semblance of
logic, we all know that we must move toward the shadows; but, even after
we are mortally stricken by disease or age, we persist in acting and
thinking as if there were no end. In youth we go almost further; we are
too apt to live as though we were immortal, and as though there were
absolutely nothing to result from human action or human inaction. To the
young man and the young woman the future is not a blind lane with a
grave at the end; it is a spacious plain reaching away towards a far-off
horizon; and that horizon recedes and recedes as they move forward,
leaving magnificent expanses to be crossed in joyous freedom. A pretty
delusion! The youth harks onward, si