_What have the long years brought me since first, with this pen for
pickaxe, I bowed my loins to quarry from the living rock of my world about
me, bread and a home where Love should smile beside the hearthplace, and
chiefly for Love's dear sake, that men should honour you who, above all on
earth, I hold most in honour--a name among the writers of books that
live!_
_What have the long years brought me! Well, not the things I hoped. Just
bread and clothing, fire, and a little roof-tree; the purchased soil to
make a grave, and a space of leisure, before that grave be needed, to
write, myself, this book for me and for you. Hope has spread her
iridescent Psyche-wings and left me; Ambition long ago shed hers to become
a working-ant. Love never came to sit in the chair beside the ingle. An
ocean heaves between us, only for nightly dreams and waking thoughts to
span. Were those dear eyes to see me as I am to-day, I wonder whether they
would know me? For I grow grey, and furrows deepen in the forehead the
dear hand will never smooth again. Remember me, then, only as I used to
be; my heart is the same always; in it the long, long years have wrought
no change._
_But what have the long years brought me? Experience, that savoury salt,
left where old tears have dried upon the shores of Time. Knowledge of my
fellow men and women, of all sorts and conditions, and the love of them.
Patience to bear what may yet have to be borne. Courage to encounter what
may yet have to be encountered. Fortitude to meet the end, where faith
holds up the Cross. Much have the long years brought me--besides your
first smile and your last kiss. For your next, I look past Death, God
aiding me, to the Eternal Life beyond...._