Locking the packet in the little cupboard in the wall which Mary had given him, as she playfully said, "to keep his treasures in"-- he threw himself again on his bed, and, thoroughly exhausted, tried to sleep.
"It will be all right, I think!" he murmured to himself, as he closed his eyes wearily--"At any rate, so far as I am concerned, I have done with the world! God grant some good may come of my millions after I am dead! After I am dead! How strange it sounds! What will it seem like, I wonder,--to be dead ?" And he suddenly thought of a poem he had read some years back,--one of the finest and most daring thoughts ever expressed in verse, from the pen of a fine and much neglected poet, Robert Buchanan:-- "Master, if there be Doom, All men are bereaven! If in the Universe One Spirit receive the curse, Alas for Heaven! If there be Doom for one, Thou, Master, art undone! "Were I a Soul in Heaven, Afar from pain;-- Yea, on thy breast of snow, At the scream of one below, I should scream again-- Art Thou less piteous than The conception of a Man ?" "No, no, not less piteous!" he murmured--"But surely infinitely more pitiful!".