case
as cautiously as a cragsman, to renew in himself the sense of their skeleton
of reality. Every stair is a ladder and every stool a leg, he said.
And at other times he would play the stranger exactly in the opposite sense,
and would enter by another way, so as to feel like a thief and a robber.
He would break and violate his own home, as he had done with me that night.
It was near morning before I could tear myself from this queer confidence
of the Man Who Would Not Die, and as I shook hands with him on the doorstep
the last load of fog was lifting, and rifts of daylight revealed the stairway
of irregular street levels that looked like the end of the world.

"It will be enough for many to say that I had passed a night with a maniac.
What other term, it will be said, could be applied to such a being?
A man who reminds himself that he is married by pretending not to be married!
A man who tries to covet his own goods instead of his neighbor's! On
this I have but one word to say, and I feel it of my honour to say it,
though no one understands. I believe the maniac was one of those who
do not merely come, but are sent; sent like a great gale upon ships
by Him who made His angels winds and His messengers a flaming fire.
This, at least, I know for certain. Whether such men have laughed
or wept, we have laughed at their laughter as much as at their weeping.
Whether they cursed or blessed the world, they have never fitted it.
It is true that men have shrunk from the sting of a great satirist
as if from the sting of an adder. But it is equally true that men flee
from the embrace of a great optimist as from the embrace of a bear.
Nothing brings down more curses than a real benediction.
For the goodness of good things, like the badness of bad things,
is a prodigy past speech; it is to be pictured rather than spoken.
We shall have gone deeper than the deeps of heaven and grown older than
the oldest angels before we feel, even in its first faint vibrations,
the everlasting violence of that double passion with which God hates
and loves the world.--I am, yours faithfully,
"Raymond Percy."

"Oh, 'oly, 'oly, 'oly!" said Mr. Moses Gould.

The instant he had spoken all the rest knew they had been
in an almost religious state of submission and assent.
Something had bound them together; something in the sacred tradition
of the last two words of the letter; something also in the touching