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ST. AMAR.

Some higher dispensation makes madmen of those who lose their way and fail to return with their riches.

It may be that the made are victims of conflicting elements in other spheres, and that they bring with them to this life a consciousness of dissentient voices now calling them back to destruction, now urging them on to rebirth and completion.

My brother seemed one of these haunted creatures and memory brings him to me as ever listening to contrary voices. As a child I would watch him pacing up and down, clasping his hands tightly behind him. Over a black velvet jacket fell his fair hair. His tightly shut mouth was awry and unhappy; his blue eyes strangely sharp and questioning. Aloud he would beg some unseen presence to pardon him, to let him return; this was his call back to rebirth. Then again he would ask if he must die and go to hell; this his call to destruction.

Again I remember, at about the same period, sitting alone with my brother at a long table, He is saying grace -- an endless improvised prayer. It lasts a very long time. I sit patiently with bowed head, but the servants have abandoned us and the meal grows cold on the table. Perhaps I can attribute to a childish sympathy or even admiration for my brother the indelibility of these two impressions. I was about five years of age at the time and my brother was twelve. 

[[margin note]] 3 or j (?) [[/margin note]]

Shortly before this, after an attack of scarlet fever, he had been sent to the country to recuperate at the home of an over-yealous [[over-zealous]] and religious grandmother. She, probably fearing that the unsanctioned addition of "Saint" to his already foreign name would call fourth Jehovian wrath, as propitiation filled the sensitive and anaemic [[anemic]] brain with the dogmas of her own stern, puritanical religion. This wrought havoc and