gorge before I have done with you, you old goliath
of your tribe. I shall have you down.'

He laboured with dogged fury. His hands blistered at the unaccustomed
task. The helve of the axe was stained with blood, and clung to his
grasp as if his palms were glued. His blows grew altogether ineffectual
The axe fell sideways often, and at such times the blow jarred him to
the spine. 'You will come down,' he said, 'if I die for it' He went back
to the tent, and casting himself on the turf before it, laved his hands
in the ice-cold mountain-stream. In half an hour he returned to his
task, and worked at it until he could no longer lift a hand. Even then,
as he walked brokenly away, he turned with an angry murmur:

'I'll have you down!'

He built his fire, and brewed and sipped his tea and munched his rations
in great weariness that night, and it was earlier than usual when he
rolled himself in his blanket and lay down. But though he ached with
fatigue from neck to heel, there was no sleep for him. He seemed to hang
suspended over a great lake of slumber, and to hold, in spite of his own
will, to a bar which magnetized his burning palms. He had but to release
the bar to fall deep into oblivion, but his grasp was fixed, and he
had no power to loose it. So, after many hours of tumbling this way and
that, he arose, and fed his fire with dry chips until it flamed; and
then, in alternate gushes of light and darkness, he read his father's
letter.

'Hendricks has just left me, and I succeeded in getting from him at the
last a plain statement of his opinion. I may last a month longer, but
he thinks it unlikely. I may go in a week. A chill, or a shock, or any
little trifle may precipitate the change, and make an end at any moment.
I can write for a few minutes at a time, and I am trying for Paul's sake
to say one or two things which will make my future task more likely of
success....

'I was fifty when my father died. I had been bred in the strictest
Calvinistic school; but my heart had revolted against the creed, and
from the time when I was five-and-twenty my mind had rejected it with
equal decision and disdain. I looked for no other faith or form of
faith. At the centre of the negation in which I lived there was this one
thought: There may, for anything I can tell, be a great First Cause. I
cannot know. I can neither affirm nor deny, for the whole question is
beyond my understanding. But this at least seems clear: If there be a