THE WAYS OF LIFE
TWO STORIES
BY
MRS. OLIPHANT
———
“We have wrought no new deliverance in the earth”
———
G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS
NEW YORK & LONDON
The Knickerbocker Press
1897
{2}
Copyright, 1897
BY
G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS
The Knickerbocker Press, New York
CONTENTS.
| PAGE | |
| A PREFACE: ON THE EBB TIDE | 7 |
| MR. SANDFORD | 21 |
| THE WONDERFUL HISTORY OF MR. ROBERT DALYELL | 149 |
THE WAYS OF LIFE.
A PREFACE.
ON THE EBB TIDE.
I do not pretend to say that the two stories included in this volume areconscious or intentional studies of the phase of human experience whichI can describe in no other way than by calling it the ebb, incontradistinction to that tide in the affairs of men which we all knowis, to those who can identify and seize it, the great turning-point oflife, and leads on to fortune. But they were at least produced under theinfluence of the strange discovery which a man makes when he findshimself carried away by the retiring waters, no longer coming in uponthe top of the wave, but going out. This does not necessarily mean thedecline of life, the approach of age, or any natural crisis, butsomething more poignant—{8}the wonderful and overwhelming revelationwhich one time or other comes to most people, that their career,whatever it may have been, has come to a stop: that such successes asthey may have achieved are over, and that henceforward they mustaccustom themselves to the thought of going out with the tide. It is avery startling discovery to one who has perhaps been going with atolerably full sail, without any consciousness of weakened energies orfailing power; and it usually is as sudden as it is strange, a thingunforeseen by the sufferer himself, though probably other people havealready found it out, and traced the steps of its approach. Writers offiction, and those whose work it is to realise and exhibit, as far as inthem lies, the vicissitudes and alterations of life, are more usuallyemployed in illustrating the advance of that tide—in showing how it iscaught or lost, and with what an impetus, and what accompaniments itflings itself higher and higher up upon the beach, with the sunshinetriumphant in the whirl of the big wave as it tu