so that it would
last for years. And this strangely ill-fated curlew set me thinking if
it were a tame bird escaped from captivity, but tame birds lose quickly
their instinct of finding food. "It must have been freed yesterday or
the day before," I said to myself, and in pondering how far a bird might
fly in the night, this curlew came to occupy a sort of symbolic
relation towards my past and my future life, and it was in thinking of
it that the idea occurred to me that, if I could cross the lake on the
ice, I might swim it in the summer-time when the weather was warm,
having, of course, hidden a bundle of clothes amid the rocks on the
Joycetown side. My clerical clothes will be found on this side, and the
assumption will be, of course, that I swam out too far.

'This way of escape seemed at first fantastic and unreal, but it has
come to seem to me the only practical way out of my difficulty. In no
other way can I leave the parish without giving pain to the poor people,
who have been very good to me. And you, who appreciated my scruples on
this point, will, I am sure, understand the great pain it would give my
sisters if I were to leave the Church. It would give them so much pain
that I shrink from trying to imagine it. They would look upon themselves
as disgraced, and the whole family. My disappearance from the parish
would ever do them harm--Eliza's school would suffer for sure. This may
seem an exaggeration, but certainly Eliza would never quite get over it.
If this way of escape had not been revealed to me, I don't think I ever
should have found courage to leave, and if I didn't leave I should die.
Life is so ordered that a trace remains of every act, but the trace is
not always discovered, and I trust you implicitly. You will never show
this letter to anyone; you will never tell anyone.

'The Church would allow me, no doubt, to pick up a living as best I
could, and would not interfere with me till I said something or wrote
something that the Church thought would lessen its power; then the cry
of unfrocked priest would be raised against me, and calumny, the great
ecclesiastical weapon, would be used. I do not know what my future life
will be: my past has been so beset with misfortune that, once I reach
the other side, I shall never look back. I cannot find words to tell you
of the impatience with which I wait the summer-time, the fifteenth of
July, when the moon will be full. I cannot think what would have
happene