here state that I was. I seemed the ordinary youth of my time, bow in my
'Varsity eight, cramming for exams., dawdling in clubs. When I had to
decide as to a profession, who could have suspected the conflict that
transacted itself in my soul, while my brain was indifferent to the
matter--that agony of strife with which the brawling voices shouted, the
one: 'Be a scientist--a doctor,' and the other: 'Be a lawyer, an
engineer, an artist--be _anything_ but a doctor!'

A doctor I became, and went to what had grown into the greatest of
medical schools--Cambridge; and there it was that I came across a man,
named Scotland, who had a rather odd view of the world. He had rooms, I
remember, in the New Court at Trinity, and a set of us were generally
there. He was always talking about certain 'Black' and 'White Powers,
till it became absurd, and the men used to call him
'black-and-white-mystery-man,' because, one day, when someone said
something about 'the black mystery of the universe,' Scotland
interrupted him with the words: 'the black-and-white mystery.'

Quite well I remember Scotland now--the sweetest, gentle soul he was,
with a passion for cats, and Sappho, and the Anthology, very short in
stature, with a Roman nose, continually making the effort to keep his
neck straight, and draw his paunch in. He used to say that the universe
was being frantically contended for by two Powers: a White and a Black;
that the White was the stronger, but did not find the conditions on our
particular planet very favourable to his success; that he had got the
best of it up to the Middle Ages in Europe, but since then had been
slowly and stubbornly giving way before the Black; and that finally the
Black would win--not everywhere perhaps, but _here_--and would carry
off, if no other earth, at least _this_ one, for his prize.