ave voice, only sorry when it comes to an end. So the
days pass, and I will not say I have no pleasure in them, because I
have won back a sort of odd childish pleasure in small incidents,
sights, and sounds. The part of me that can feel seems to have been
simply cut gently away, and I live in the hour, just glad when the sun
is out, sorry when it is dull and cheerless.

I read the other day one of my old books, and I could not believe it
was mine. It seemed like the voice of some one I had once known long
ago, in a golden hour. I was amused and surprised at my own quickness
and inventiveness, at the confidence with which I interpreted
everything so glibly and easily. I cannot interpret any more, and I do
not seem to desire to do so. I seem to wait, with a half-amused smile,
to see if God can make anything out of the strange tangle of things, as
a child peers in within a scaffolding, and sees nothing but a forest of
poles, little rising walls of chambers, a crane swinging weights to and
fro. What can ever come, he thinks, out of such strange confusion, such
fruitless hurry?

Well, I will not write any more; a sense of weariness and futility
comes over me. I will go back to my garden to see what I can see, only
dumbly and mutely thankful that it is not required of me to perform any
dull and monotonous task, which would interrupt my idle dreams.

February 8, 1891.

I tried this morning to look through some of the old letters and papers
in Maud's cabinet. There were my own letters, carefully tied up with a
ribbon; letters from her mother and father; from the children when we
were away from them. I began to read, and was seized with a sharp,
unreasoning pain, surprised by sudden tears. I seemed dumbly to resent
this, and I put them all away again. Why should I disturb myself to no
purpose? "There shall be no more sorrow nor crying, for the former
things are passed away"--so runs the old verse, and I had almost grown
to feel like that. Why distrust it? Yet I could not forbear. I got the
papers out again, and read late into the night, like one reading an old
and beautiful story. Suddenly the curtain lifted, and I saw myself
alone, I saw what I had lost. The ineffectual agony I endured, crying
out for very loneliness! "That was all mine," said the melting heart,
so long frozen and dumb. Grief, in waves and billows, began to beat
upon me like breakers on a rock-bound shore. A strange fever of the
spirit came on me, scene