The note-book itself I guarded with care. It was a pocket-journal, and my friend had tried to make it a record of his life for the preceding year. There were entries of letters received and sent, of money earned and spent, of acquaintances made, of business appointments, of dinner engagements, and of visits to the doctor. Evidently his health had been failing fast, and he had been struggling hard to keep the knowledge not only from his mother, but even from himself. While he had set down these outward facts of his life, he had also used the note-book as the record of his inward feelings. To an extent that he little understood, that journal, with its fragmentary entries and its stray thoughts, told the story of his spiritual experience.
Many of the entries were personal, but many were not; they were merely condensations of the thought of the moment as it passed through his mind. Here are two specimens:
“We judge others by the facts of life—by what we hear them say and see them do. We judge ourselves rather by our own feelings—by what we intend and desire and hope to do some day in the future. Thus a poor man may glow with inward satisfaction at the thought of the hospital he is going to build when he gets rich. And a wealthy man can at least pride himself on the fortitude with which he would, if need be, bear the deprivations of poverty.”
“To pardon is the best and the bitterest vengeance.”
Toward the end of the year the business entries became fewer and fewer, as though he had tired of keeping the record of his doings. But the later pages were far fuller than the earlier of his reflections—sometimes a true thought happily expressed, sometimes, more often than not perhaps, a mere verbal antithesis, such as have furnished forth many an aphorism long before my friend was born. And these later sentiments had a tinge of bitterness lacking in the earlier.
“There are few houses,” he wrote, in October, apparently, “where happiness is a permanent boarder; generally it is but a transient guest; and sometimes, indeed, it is only a tramp that knocks at the side door and is refused admittance.”
“Many a man forgets his evil deeds so swiftly that he is honestly surprised when any one else recalls them.”
Except the directions to me for the expenditure of the five hundred dollars, the last two entries in the book were written on Christmas morning. One of these was the passage which smote me most when I first read it, for it struck me as sadness itself when written by a young man not yet twenty-five:
“If we had nothing else to wish, we should at least wish to die.”
At the time I did not seize the full significance of the other passage, longer than this, and far sadder when its meaning was finally grasped.