see which will be the most painful process: as soon as _he_ gets an
idea of whither he is being led, how thankful he will be for every
pang that teaches him restraint, and purifies; while we—we shall
suffer blind wrench after wrench, _stung_ into feeling at any cost, and
not till we painfully overtop the barrier shall we guess whither we
are going."

I do not mean from this that he thought lightly of sin—far from
it. I have seen him give all the physical signs of shrinking and
repulsion, at the mention or sight of it. He loathed it with all the
agonized disgust of a high, pure, fastidious nature. Its phenomena
were without the lurid interest for him which it often possesses even
for the sternest moralist.

This loathing had its physical antitype in his horror of the sight or
description of bodily disease. I have seen him several times go off
into a dead faint at even the bare description of bodily suffering. I
went with him once, at his own request, to a seaman's hospital, where
there was a poor fellow who had fallen from a mast and been terribly
smashed. His legs had both been amputated, and he lay looking
terribly white and emaciated with a cradle over the stumps.

He gave us, with great eagerness, an account of the accident, as
people in the lower classes always will. In the middle, Arthur
stepped suddenly to the door and went out. I was not aware at the
time of this failing of his, and the move was executed with such
deliberate directness that I thought he must have forgotten
something. When I went out to the open air I found Arthur, deadly
pale, sitting on the grassy paving-stones of the little yard. He
insisted, as soon as he was restored, in going in to wish good-bye