happiest: that self-addressed assertion often implies some tacit
contradiction.

When darkness came he wondered if he should put on his snow-shoes and
run over to Turrifs. Yet for some reason he did not go, in the way that
men so often do not do things that they think on the whole would be very
good things to do. An hour or two later he knew that the good people
there would have gone to bed and that he had no longer the option of
going. He did not go to bed himself. He had not had enough exercise that
day to make him sleepy; and then, too, he thought he would sit up and
see the old year out. He had an indistinct idea that it was rather a
virtuous thing to do, rather more pious than sleeping the night through
just as if it were any other night. He put his much-handled, oft-read
books down before him on the table, and set himself to passing the
evening with them. Midnight is actually midnight when the sun goes down
before five o'clock and there is no artificial interest for the after
hours.

Most men have more religion at heart, latent or developed, than can be
seen by others. When they have not, when what shows is as much as what
is--God pity them!

Alec Trenholme was not given to self-dissection or to expression of his
private sentiments, therefore neither to himself nor to others was the
religion of him very visible. Nevertheless, this evening his books,
which had become not less but more to him because he had read them
often, palled upon his taste. When he was a boy his father had taught
him that at New Year's time one ought to consider whether the past had
been spent well, and how the future could be spent better. So, as time
went on, he pushed his books further and set himself to this