imes already, and
yet, like Mr. Jamieson, my neighbour, on this one January morning he
kills his own son, converting in a single instant, by a trivial
incident, the whole of the rest of his life from sweet into bitter,
by the terrible punishment which falls upon 'carelessness.' God seems
to be asking us to weigh the fact, that in a chain of events the
tiniest link is every bit as important and necessary in its place as
the largest.

"And so I begin to take more and more account of little things. The
very people we pass in the street once, it may be never to pass
again, the stream of faces that flows past us in London--has all
that no real connection with our life, except to stir a faint and
vague emotion about the size of life and our own infinitesimal share
in it? I think it must be something more. Of course, one lets drop
grain after grain of golden truth that God slips into our hands. I
keep feeling that if we could only truly yield ourselves up for a
single instant, put ourselves utterly and wholly in God's hands for a
second, the meaning of the whole would flash upon us, and our lesson
would be learnt. I think perhaps that comes in death. I remember the
only time I took an anaesthetic (when the body really momentarily
dies--that is, the functions are temporarily suspended), the great
sensation was, after a brief passage of storm and agony, the sense of
serenity and repose upon a lesson learnt, a truth grasped, so remote
and so connected with infinite ideas, that the coming back into life
was like the waking after years of experience; a phantom emotion,
I expect; but, like many phantoms, a very good copy of the real one.
That is what I expect dying to be like.

"I was going to say that I try not to let even little things--things
that are thrust in my way curiously and without apparent reason that
is--go uninterpreted. Why should I, for instance, have been
introduced by my clergyman to the friend who was staying with him
this morning, when I met them in the lane? and why should he have
come in to lunch, and talked dull and trivial talk till three
o'clock, and interrupted all our plans? There seems some design in
it all; and yet one is so impotent to grasp what it can be.

"Yet I suppose no one has failed to notice several small coincidences
in their lives, of what might almost be called a providential kind.

"I read in a book about Laennec's method, without the vaguest idea of
who Laennec was, or what his method