it around with him for so long that it was almost like an incurable heart-ache or a mental strain from which one never found surcease. Jamie felt reasonably sure that he could eliminate the death by water, fire, and explosion. He did not feel that any of these things were likely to happen to him. So there were the two remaining kinds of death; he must face one or the other.
That carried his mind back to the time when as a little boy he had said his prayers indiscriminately at the knees of either his mother or his father, for his father had been woman tender with his only child. There had been a period of years when he had knelt beside his bed and repeated what he had been taught with some additions of his own. There had been still later years when he had gotten into bed and muttered a makeshift prayer. And then there had been another stretch of years when, in the pride of his strength and the diverse interests of the full day, he had been so sufficient in his own body and his own mentality to any need that assailed him that he not only had not prayed a prayer of asking—because he was getting along very well without asking for anything—but he had not offered a prayer of thanksgiving. And as he sat there that afternoon, looking over the blue garden that was merely a small mountain running down to the sea, studying the beauty of the flowers, the foliage and the fruit, and then looking on to the white reaches of sand and the blue of the ocean and the sky stretching away halfway round the world, he was assailed by a distinct sorrow, a feeling of regret that he had ever ceased his nightly
