most
unexplored and practically incredible.--An everyday occurrence, a
commonplace, concerning which there remains nothing new, nothing
original, to be written, sung or said; yet a mystery still inviolate,
aching with the alarm of the undiscovered, the unpenetrated, to each
individual, summoned to accept its empire! He had sent others to their
death. Now his own turn came and he found it, however calmly considered,
a rather astounding business. An ending or a beginning?--Useless, after
all, to speculate. The worst feature of it, not improbably, this same
preliminary loneliness, this stripping naked, no smallest comfort left
you of human companionship, or even of humble material keepsake from out
the multitude of your familiar possessions here in the dear accustomed
human scene.

The gates of death open. You pass them. They close behind you. And what
then?--The whole hierarchy of heaven, the whole company of your
forerunners thither--beloved and honoured on earth--may be gathered to
hail the homing soul within those amazing portals; or it may drop, as a
stone into a well, down the blank nothingness of the abyss.--Of all
gambles invented by God, man or devil--so he told himself--this daily,
hourly gamble of individual dissolution is the biggest. Man's heart
refuses the horror of extinction, while his intellect holds the question
in suspense. We hope. We believe. From of old fair promises have been
made us; and, granted the gift of faith, hope and belief neighbour upon
assurance. But certainty is denied. No mortal, still clothed in flesh,
has known, nor--the accumulated science of the ages notwithstanding--does
know, actually and exactly, that which awaits it.

Thus, anyhow, in the still, tender brightness of the autumn morning,
while Nature and men alike pursued their normal activities and
occupations, did this singular matter appear to Charles Verity--he,
himself, arbitrarily cut off from all such activities and occupations
in the very moment of high fruition. Had death been a less eminent
affair, or less imminent, the sarcasm of his position might have seemed
gross to the point of insult. But, the longer he envisaged it, the more
did the enduring enigma and its accompanying uncertainty allure. Not as
victim, but rather as conqueror of the final terror, did he begin to
regard himself.

Meanwhile, though reason continued to hold the balance even between
things positively known and things imagined only and hoped for, th