. I said one might logically conclude from such a circumstance
that the future was a fixed quantity.

"As absolutely fixed as the past," he said; and added the remark already
quoted.--[Chap. lxxv] A little later he continued:

"Even the Almighty Himself cannot check or change that sequence of events
once it is started. It is a fixed quantity, and a part of the scheme is
a mental condition during certain moments usually of sleep--when the mind
may reach out and grasp some of the acts which are still to come."

It was a new angle to me--a line of logic so simple and so utterly
convincing that I have remained unshaken in it to this day. I have never
been able to find any answer to it, nor any one who could even attempt to
show that the first act of the first created atom did not strike the
key-note of eternity.

At another time, speaking of the idea that God works through man, he
burst out:

"Yes, of course, just about as much as a man works through his microbes!"

He had a startling way of putting things like that, and it left not much
to say.

I was at this period interested a good deal in mental healing, and had
been treated for neurasthenia with gratifying results. Like most of the
world, I had assumed, from his published articles, that he condemned
Christian Science and its related practices out of hand. When I
confessed, rather reluctantly, one day, the benefit I had received, he
surprised me by answering:

"Of course you have been benefited. Christian Science is humanity's
boon. Mother Eddy deserves a place in the Trinity as much as any member
of it. She has organized and made available a healing principle that for
two thousand years has never been employed, except as the merest kind of
guesswork. She is the benefactor of the age."

It seemed strange, at the time, to hear him speak in this way concerning
a practice of which he was generally regarded as the chief public
antagonist. It was another angle of his many-sided character.

CCXL

THE DEFINITION OF A GENTLEMAN

That was a busy winter for him socially. He was constantly demanded for
this thing and that--for public gatherings, dinners--everywhere he was a
central figure. Once he presided at a Valentine dinner given by some
Players to David Munro. He had never presided at a dinner before, he
said, and he did it in his own way, which certainly was a taking one,
suitable to that carefree company and occasion--a real Scotch occasion,
with the Mu