must be there in the glass case beside me.

Any one who at Abbotsford has felt of the white beaver hat of Sir Walter
Scott knows that he has touched part--and a very considerable part--of
Sir Walter. The hat, the boots, the waistcoat are far less ephemeral
than the body they protect, and indicate almost as much of the wearer's
character as his hands and face. So I am not ashamed of my silk pajamas
or of the geranium powder I throw in my bath. They are part of me.

But is this "me" limited to my body and my clothes? I drink a cup of
coffee or a cocktail: after they are consumed they are part of me; are
they not part of me as I hold the cup or the glass in my hand? Is my
coat more characteristic of me than my house--my sleeve-links than my
wife or my collie dog? I know a gentlewoman whose sensitive, quivering,
aristocratic nature is expressed far more in the Russian wolfhound that
shrinks always beside her than in the aloof, though charming,
expression of her face. No; not only my body and my personal effects but
everything that is mine is part of me--my chair with the rubbed arm; my
book, with its marked pages; my office; my bank account, and in some
measure my friend himself.

Let us agree that in the widest sense all that I have, feel or think is
part of me--either of my physical or mental being; for surely my
thoughts are more so than the books that suggest them, and my sensations
of pleasure or satisfaction equally so with the dinner I have eaten or
the cigar I have smoked. My ego is the sum total of all these things.
And if the cigar is consumed, the dinner digested, the pleasure flown,
the thought forgotten, the waistcoat or shirt discarded--so, too, do the
tissues of the body dissolve, disintegrate and change. I can no more
retain permanently the physical elements of my personality than I can
the mental or spiritual.

What, then, am I--who, the Scriptures assert, am made in the image of
God? Who and what is this being that has gradually been evolved during
fifty years of life and which I call Myself? For whom my father and my
mother, their fathers and mothers, and all my ancestors back through the
gray mists of the forgotten past, struggled, starved, labored, suffered,
and at last died. To what end did they do these things? To produce me?
God forbid!

Would the vision of me as I am to-day have inspired my grandfather to
undergo, as cheerfully as he did, the privations and austerities of his
long and arduous