it has come to that with _me_!

* * * * *

Oh, Mary, Mary, Duchess of Towers, sweet friend of my childhood, and
love of my life, what must you think of me now?

* * * * *

How blessed are the faithful! How good it must be to trust in God and
heaven, and the forgiveness of sin, and be as a little child in all but
innocence! A whole career of crime wiped out in a moment by just one
cheap little mental act of faith at the eleventh hour, in the extreme
terror of well-merited dissolution; and all the evil one has worked
through life (that goes on breeding evil for ages to come) taken off
one's shoulders like a filthy garment, and just cast aside, anywhere,
anyhow, for the infecting of others--who do not count.

What matter if it be a fool's paradise? Paradise is paradise, for
whoever owns it!

* * * * *

They say a Sicilian drum-major, during the French occupation of Palermo,
was sentenced to be shot. He was a well-known coward, and it was feared
he would disgrace his country at the last moment in the presence of the
French soldiers, who had a way of being shot with a good grace and a
light heart: they had grown accustomed to it.

For the honor of Sicily his confessor told him, in the strictest