y knew
it. And I did not, no, I did not rush before Him; but I lay at the
bottom of the river.

I have heard it said that drowning persons recall, as by a sudden
omniscience, all their past lives, as soon as the water closes above
them and the first shock of horror is past. It was not so with me. I
remembered nothing beyond the events of the past week; but, by some
strange action of the mind, as soon as the gasping sense of an unnatural
element passed away, my thoughts went forward. I became, as it were,
another man; and above me on the bank I saw calmly the stone where my
living double had left his cripple's cane, and thought to myself for one
sharp moment, "Fool!"--for I looked forward. _If I had not drowned_,
that was the key-note of the theme. Something that was me and was not me
rose up from the water-wall and went away,--a man racked and broken by
a great sorrow, it is true, but a man conscious of God. Life had turned
its darkest page for him, but there was the impassable fact that it was
the darkest; no further depths remained to dread; the worst had come,
and he looked it in the face and studied it; suffer he might, but
with full knowledge of every agony. Life had been wrecked, but living
remained. Calmly he took up the cripple's cane and went home; the
birds sang no song,--after tempests they do not sing until the sun
shines,--neither did the blossoms give him any greeting. Nature wastes
no trivialities on such grief; the mother, whose child comes in to her
broken-limbed and wounded, does not give it sugar-plums and kisses, but
waits in silence till the surgeon has done his kindly and appalling
office,--then, it may be, she sings her boy to sleep!

But this man took up life again and conquered it. Home grew about him
into serenity and cheer; as from the roots of a felled tree a thousand
verdant offshoots spring, tiny in stature, but fresh and vivid in
foliage, so out of this beheaded love arose a crowd of sweet affections
and tender services that made the fraternity of man seem possible, and
illustrated the pervasive care of God. He went out into life, and from
a heart wrung with all man can endure, and a brain tested in the fire,
spoke burning and fluent words of strength and consolation to hundreds
who, like him, had suffered, but were sinking under what he had borne.
And these words carried in them a reviving virtue. Men blessed him
silently, and women sang him in their hearts as they sing hymns of
prayer.