telling you about myself, seeing I remain concealed behind my own
words. You can never look me in the eyes, though you may look me in
the soul. You may find me out, find my faults, my vanities, my sins,
but you will not SEE me, at least in this world. To you I am but a
voice of revealing, not a form of vision; therefore I am bold behind
the mask, to speak to you heart to heart; bold, I say, just so much
the more that I do not speak to you face to face. And when we meet
in heaven--well, there I know there is no hiding; there, there is no
reason for hiding anything; there, the whole desire will be
alternate revelation and vision.

I am now getting old--faster and faster. I cannot help my gray
hairs, nor the wrinkles that gather so slowly yet ruthlessly; no,
nor the quaver that will come in my voice, not the sense of being
feeble in the knees, even when I walk only across the floor of my
study. But I have not got used to age yet. I do not FEEL one atom
older than I did at three-and-twenty. Nay, to tell all the truth, I
feel a good deal younger.--For then I only felt that a man had to
take up his cross; whereas now I feel that a man has to follow Him;
and that makes an unspeakable difference.--When my voice quavers, I
feel that it is mine and not mine; that it just belongs to me like
my watch, which does not go well-now, though it went well thirty
years ago--not more than a minute out in a month. And when I feel my
knees shake, I think of them with a kind of pity, as I used to think
of an old mare of my father's of which I was very fond when I was a
lad, and which bore me across many a field and over many a fence,
but which at last came to have the same weakness in her knees that I
have in mine; and she knew it too, and took care of them, and so of
herself, in a wise equine fashion. These things are not me--or _I_,
if the grammarians like it better, (I always feel a strife between