can I, by taking thought, bring out those same
possibilities, make them actual and patent to the world, apply them to
the highest and noblest uses, and so justify myself before men? In
some such manner did I put to my own soul the position, trying ever to
keep in view the sanctity, the holiness of life, and the preciousness
of its holiest of holies, where dwell, as I have said, the power and
the glory.

It is late in the evening of this most momentous day, and I must put
down my pen, but there is one thought which perhaps may serve as
answer to the scepticism so often expressed when I asserted my belief
in this world after all. I mean if a man, when he experiences some
transcendent joy, is prompted to express that joy in terms of nobler
effort and sterner consecration to the welfare of others--does not
this fact lead him to infer that happiness is, at least, more natural
than unhappiness? that the universe does indeed exist, in Emerson's
phrase, "hospitably for the weal of souls"? That, in fine, when the
majority turn their faces this way, first keeping the houses of their
souls swept and garnished for the love they are awaiting, then will
the mountain of our misery be levelled, our valleys of despair filled
up, and the rough places of life made plain?

So, at least, it seems to me just now as I sit and write. How I long
for a talk with my friend!

"_You're my friend!
What a thing friendship is, world without end!_"

XXXI

I was awakened by something rattling outside my open window-port,
wakened to a small tragedy. A circular wire rat-trap, depending from a
line held by someone on the poop, and containing two frantic rats,
dangled against the opening. Alas! how they ran round and round and
round! The cause of all their agony, a piece of decayed fish and a
fragment of mouldy cheese, was left untouched as they dangled before
me. The voice of my friend the Mate is audible down my ventilator. He
is arguing with the Steward, one Nicholas, of whom you have heard.
Said Nicholas is protesting in his clickety Graeco-English fashion,
that the pelt of a drowned rat (_dronded raht_, Nicholas loquitur) is
worth less than that of one skinned alive. To which horrible doctrine
my friend the Mate opposes a blustering Irish humaneness issuing in
"Dammit, ye shan't!" Rats, meanwhile dangling, they as well as their
fate hanging uncertain. At last they are lowered. (The Mate talking,
I think, over his shoulder at N