e delightful summer
heat, the freshness it enhances--he contrasts such things no longer
with the sort of place to which he is hastening. The possible duration
of life for him was indeed uncertain, the future to some degree
indefinite; but as regarded any fairly distant date, anything like a
term of years, from the first there had been no doubt at all; he would
be no longer here. Meantime it was like a delightful few days'
additional holiday from school, with which perforce one must be content
at last; or as though he had not been pardoned on that terrible
morning, but only reprieved for two or three years. Yet how large a
proportion they would have seemed in the whole sum of his years. He
would have liked to lie finally in the garden among departed pets, dear
dead dogs and horses; faintly proposes it one day; but after a while
comprehends the churchyard, with its white spots in the distant flowery
view, as filling harmoniously its own proper place there. The weary
soul seemed to be settling deeper into the body and the earth it came
of, into the condition of the flowers, the grass, proper creatures of
the earth to which he is returning. The saintly vicar visits him
considerately; is repelled with politeness; goes on his way pondering
inwardly what kind of place there might be, in any possible scheme of
another world, for so absolutely unspiritual a subject. In fact, as
the breath of the infinite world came about him, he clung all [242] the
faster to the beloved finite things still in contact with him; he had
successfully hidden from his eyes all beside.

His reprieve however lasted long enough, after all, for a certain
change of opinion of immense weight to him--a revision or reversal of
judgment. It came about in this way. When peace was arranged, with
question of rewards, pensions, and the like, certain battles or
incidents therein were fought over again, sometimes in the highest
places of debate. On such an occasion a certain speaker cites the case
of Lieutenant James Stokes and another, as being "pessimi exempli":
whereupon a second speaker gets up, prepared with full detail, insists,
brings that incidental matter to the front for an hour, tells his
unfortunate friend's story so effectively, pathetically, that, as
happens with our countrymen, they repent. The matter gets into the
newspapers, and, coming thus into sympathetic public view, something
like glory wins from Emerald Uthwart his last touch of anim