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 sof