far too widely open when I looked at anything.

I sat there on the seat and pondered over all this, and grew more and more
bitter against God for His prolonged inflictions. If He meant to draw me
nearer to Him, and make me better by exhausting me and placing obstacle
after obstacle in my way, I could assure Him He made a slight mistake.
And, almost crying with defiance, I looked up towards Heaven and told Him
so mentally, once and for all.

Fragments of the teachings of my childhood ran through my memory. The
rhythmical sound of Biblical language sang in my ears, and I talked quite
softly to myself, and held my head sneeringly askew. Wherefore should I
sorrow for what I eat, for what I drink, or for what I may array this
miserable food for worms called my earthy body? Hath not my Heavenly
Father provided for me, even as for the sparrow on the housetop, and hath
He not in His graciousness pointed towards His lowly servitor? The Lord
stuck His finger in the net of my nerves gently--yea, verily, in desultory
fashion--and brought slight disorder among the threads. And then the Lord
withdrew His finger, and there were fibres and delicate root-like
filaments adhering to the finger, and they were the nerve-threads of the
filaments. And there was a gaping hole after the finger, which was God's
finger, and a wound in my brain in the track of His finger. But when God
had touched me with His finger, He let me be, and touched me no more, and
let no evil befall me; but let me depart in peace, and let me depart with
the gaping hole. And no evil hath befallen me from the God who is the Lord
God of all Eternity.

The sound of music was borne up on the wind to me from the Students'
Allee. It was therefore past two o'clock. I took out my writing materials
to try to write something, and at the same time my book of shaving-tickets