many a man that he should come finally to an irretrievable experience,
to the assurance that everything is lost. For with that moment, if he be
strong, he is saved. I wonder if anyone ever attains real human sympathy
who has not passed through the fire of some such experience. Or to
humour either! For in the best laughter do we not hear constantly that
deep minor note which speaks of the ache in the human heart? It seems to
me I can understand Doctor North!

He died Friday morning. He had been lying very quiet all night;
suddenly he opened his eyes and said to his sister: "Good-bye, Kate,"
and shut them again. That was all. The last call had come and he was
ready for it. I looked at his face after death. I saw the iron lines of
that old struggle in his mouth and chin; and the humour that it brought
him in the lines around his deep-set eyes.

----And as I think of him this afternoon, I can see him--curiously, for
I can hardly explain it--carrying a banner as in battle right here among
our quiet hills. And those he leads seem to be the people we know, the
men, and the women, and the boys! He is the hero of a new age. In olden
days he might have been a pioneer, carrying the light of civilisation to
a new land; here he has been a sort of moral pioneer--a pioneering far
more difficult than any we have ever known. There are no heroics
connected with it, the name of the pioneer will not go ringing down the
ages; for it is a silent leadership and its success is measured by
victories in other lives. We see it now, only too dimly, when he is
gone. We reflect sadly that we did not stop to thank him. How busy we
were with our own affairs when he was among us! I wonder is there
anyone here to take up the banner he has laid down!

----I forgot to say that the Scotch Preacher chose the most impressive
text in the Bible for his talk at the funeral:

"He that is greatest among you, let him be ... as he that doth serve."

And we came away with a nameless, aching sense of loss, thinking how,
perhaps, in a small way, we might do something for somebody else--as the
old Doctor did.

XII

AN EVENING AT HOME

"How calm and quiet a delight
Is it, alone,
To read and meditate and write,
By none offended, and offending none.
To walk, ride, sit or sleep at one's own ease,
And, pleasing a man's self, none other to displease."

--_Charles Cotton, a friend of Izaak Walton_, 1650

During the last few months so many of the re