old me where it would be.
It contained a bundle of banknotes which he was giving me--so he
wrote--with the advice to get rid of them as quickly as possible.

"If I had not loved you," the letter continued, "I would have left you
an income, and you would have blessed me, instead of cursing me, as you
should have done, for spoiling your life."

This world was a school, so he viewed it, for the making of men; and
the one thing essential to a man was strength. One gathered the
impression of a deeply religious man. In these days he would, no
doubt, have been claimed as a theosophist; but his beliefs he had made
for, and adapted to, himself--to his vehement, conquering temperament.
God needed men to serve Him--to help Him. So, through many changes,
through many ages, God gave men life: that by contest and by struggle
they might ever increase in strength; to those who proved themselves
most fit the sterner task, the humbler beginnings, the greater
obstacles. And the crown of well-doing was ever victory. He appeared
to have convinced himself that he was one of the chosen, that he was
destined for great ends. He had been a slave in the time of the
Pharaohs; a priest in Babylon; had clung to the swaying ladders in the
sack of Rome; had won his way into the councils when Europe was a
battlefield of contending tribes; had climbed to power in the days of
the Borgias.

To most of us, I suppose, there come at odd moments haunting thoughts
of strangely familiar, far-off things; and one wonders whether they are
memories or dreams. We dismiss them as we grow older and the present
with its crowding interests shuts them out; but in youth they were more
persistent. With him they appeared to have remained, growing in
reality. His recent existence, closed under the white sheet in the hut
behind me as I read, was only one chapter of the story; he was looking
forward to the next.

He wondered, so the letter ran, whether he would have any voice in
choosing it. In either event he was curious of the result. What he
anticipated confidently were new opportunities, wider experience. In
what shape would these come to him?

The letter ended with a strange request. It was that, on returning to
England, I should continue to think of him: not of the dead man I had
known, the Jewish banker, the voice familiar to me, the trick of
speech, of manner--all such being but the changing clothes--but of the
man himself, the soul of him, that wou