The familiar country, evocative of a great part
of my childhood, carried my thoughts hither and thither. My thoughts
ranged like the swallows; the birds had no doubt just arrived, and in
swift elliptical flights they hunted for gnats along the banks of the
old weedy canal. That weedy canal along which the train travelled took
my thoughts back to the very beginning of my life, when I stood at the
carriage window and plagued my father and mother with questions
regarding the life of the barges passing up and down. And it was the
sudden awakenings from these memories that were so terrible--the
sudden thrust of the thought that I was going westward to see my
mother die, and that nothing could save her from death or me from
seeing her die. Perhaps to find one's self suddenly deprived of all
will is the greatest suffering of all. How many times did I say to
myself, "Nothing can save me unless I get out at the next station,"
and I imagined myself taking a car and driving away through the
country! But if I did such a thing I should be looked upon as a
madman. "One is bound on a wheel," I muttered, and I began to think
how men under sentence of death must often wonder why they were
selected especially for such a fate, and the mystery, the riddle of it
all, must be perhaps the greatest part of their pain.
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