if we would watch for everything that might improve and instruct us;
if the arrangements of our daily life were so disposed as to be a
constant school for our minds! but oftenest we take no heed of them. Man
is an eternal mystery to himself; his own person is a house into which he
never enters, and of which he studies the outside alone. Each of us need
have continually before him the famous inscription which once instructed
Socrates, and which was engraved on the walls of Delphi by an unknown
hand:

KNOW THYSELF.

CHAPTER XII

THE END OF THE YEAR

December 30th, P.M.

I was in bed, and hardly recovered from the delirious fever which had
kept me for so long between life and death. My weakened brain was making
efforts to recover its activity; my thoughts, like rays of light
struggling through the clouds, were still confused and imperfect; at
times I felt a return of the dizziness which made a chaos of all my
ideas, and I floated, so to speak, between alternate fits of mental
wandering and consciousness.

Sometimes everything seemed plain to me, like the prospect which, from
the top of some high mountain, opens before us in clear weather. We
distinguish water, woods, villages, cattle, even the cottage perched on
the edge of the ravine; then suddenly there comes a gust of wind laden
with mist, and all is confused and indistinct.

Thus, yielding to the oscillations of a half-recovered reason, I allowed
my mind to follow its various impulses without troubling myself to
separate the real from the imaginary; I glided softly from one to the
other, and my dreams and waking thoughts succeeded closely upon one
another.

Now, while my mind is wandering in this unsettled state, see, underneath
the clock which measures the hours with its loud ticking, a female figure
appears before me!

At first sight I saw enough to satisfy me that she was not a daughter of
Eve. In her eye was the last flash of an expiring star, and her face had
the pallor of an heroic death-struggle. She was dressed in a drapery of a
thousand changing colors of the brightest and the most sombre hues, and
held a withered garland in her hand.

After having contemplated her for some moments, I asked her name, and
what brought her into my attic. Her eyes, which were following the
movements of the clock, turned toward me, and she replied:

"You see in me the year which is just drawing to its end; I come to
receive your thanks and your f