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I Cannot now trace the slow or swift flitting by of phantasmal events, … wild ghosts of days or weeks that drifted past, and brought me gradually and finally to a time when I found myself wandering, numb and stricken and sick at heart, by the shores of a lake in Switzerland,—a small lake, densely blue, with apparently a thought in its depths such as is reflected in a child's earnest eye. I gazed down at the clear and glistening water almost unseeingly,—the snow-peaked mountains surrounding it were too high for the lifting of my aching sight, —loftiness, purity, and radiance were unbearable to my mind, crushed as it was beneath a weight of dismal wreckage and ruin. What a fool was I, ever to have believed that in this world there could be such a thing as happiness! Misery stared me in t
