Three months go over. The calendar of my daily conduct and labour
that hangs on the outside of my cell door, with my name and
sentence written upon it, tells me that it is May. . . .

Prosperity, pleasure and success, may be rough of grain and common
in fibre, but sorrow is the most sensitive of all created things.
There is nothing that stirs in the whole world of thought to which
sorrow does not vibrate in terrible and exquisite pulsation. The
thin beaten-out leaf of tremulous gold that chronicles the
direction of forces the eye cannot see is in comparison coarse. It
is a wound that bleeds when any hand but that of love touches it,
and even then must bleed again, though not in pain.

Where there is sorrow there in holy ground. Some day people will
realise what that means. They will know nothing of life till they
do, - and natures like his can realise it. When I was brought down
from my prison to the Court of Bankruptcy, between two policemen, -
waited in the long dreary corridor that, before the whole crowd,
whom an action so sweet and simple hushed into silence, he might
gravely raise his hat to me, as, handcuffed and with bowed head, I
passed him by. Men have gone to heaven for smaller things than
that. It was in this spirit, and with this mode of love, that the
saints knelt down to wash the feet of the poor, or stooped to kiss
the leper on the cheek. I have never said one single word to him
about what he did. I do not know to the present moment whether he
is aware that I was even conscious of his action. It is not a
thing for which one can render formal thanks in formal words. I
store it in the treasure-house of my heart. I keep it there as a
secret debt that I am glad to think I can never possibly repay. It