when I sat down to dinner--fearfully hungry. I had a thick
English chop on the plate before me; and a green salad, oily in its bowl,
and crisp, browned potatoes, and a mug of creamy ale. I'd gone to the
place for a treat. I'd been whetting my appetite with nibbles of bread and
sips of ale until the other things came; and then, even when I put my
knife to the chop--like a blade pushed very slowly into my heart came the
thought: 'My father is burning in hell--screaming in agony for a drop of
this water which I shall not touch because I have ale. He has been in this
agony for years; he will be there forever.' That was enough, sir. I had to
leave the little feast. I was hungry no longer, though a moment before it
had seemed that I couldn't wait for it. I walked out into the cold, raw
night--walked till near daylight, with the sweat running off me. And the
thing I knew all the time was this: that if I were in hell and my father
in heaven, he would blaspheme God to His face for a monster and come to
hell to burn with me forever--come with a joke and a song, telling me
never to mind, that we'd have a fine time there in hell in spite of
everything! That was what I knew of my poor, cheap, fiddle-playing
mountebank of a father. Just a moment more--this is what you must remember
of me, in whatever I have to say hereafter, that after that night I never
ceased to suffer all the hell my father could be suffering, and I suffered
it until my mind went out in that sickness. But, listen now: whatever has
happened--I'm not yet sure what it is--I no longer suffer. Two things only
I know: that our creed still has my godless, scoffing, unbaptised father
in hell, and that my love for him--my absolute _oneness_ with him--has not
lessened.

"I'll stop there, if you wish, leaving you to divine what other change has
taken place."

"There, there," soothed the old man, seizing the shoulders once more with
his strong grip--"no more now, boy. It was a hard thing, I know. The
consciousness of God's majesty comes often in that way, and often it
overwhelms the unprepared. It was hard, but it will leave you more a man;
your soul and your faith will both survive. Do what I have told you--as if
you were once more the puzzled little Bernal, who never could keep his
hair neatly brushed like Allan, and would always moon in corners. Go
finish your course. Another year, when your mind has new fortitude from
your recreated body, we will talk these matters as muc