rought it with me, for it has finer lines, I almost
think, than any in George Herbert, though not so fine poems by any
means as his best. When we go into the house I will read one of them to
you."

"Thank you," said Turner. "I wish I could have such talk once a week.
The shades of the prison-house, you know, Mr. Walton, are always trying
to close about us, and shut out the vision of the glories we have come
from, as Wordsworth says."

"A man," I answered, "who ministers to the miserable necessities of his
fellows has even more need than another to believe in the light and the
gladness--else a poor Job's comforter will he be. _I_ don't want to be
treated like a musical snuff-box."

The doctor laughed.

"No man can _prove_," he said, "that there is not a being inside the
snuff-box, existing in virtue of the harmony of its parts, comfortable
when they go well, sick when they go badly, and dying when it is
dismembered, or even when it stops."

"No," I answered. "No man can prove it. But no man can convince a human
being of it. And just as little can anyone convince me that my
conscience, making me do sometimes what I _don't_ like, comes from a
harmonious action of the particles of my brain. But it is time we went
in, for by the law of things in general, I being ready for my dinner,
my dinner ought to be ready for me."

"A law with more exceptions than instances, I fear," said Turner.

"I doubt that," I answered. "The readiness is everything, and that we
constantly blunder in. But we had better see whether we are really
ready for it, by trying whether it is ready for us."

Connie went to bed early, as indeed we all did, and she was rather
better than worse the next morning. My wife, for the first time for
many nights, said nothing about the crying of the sea. The following
day Turner and I set out to explore the neighbourhood. The rest
remained quietly at home.

It was, as I have said, a high bare country. The fields lay side by
side, parted from each other chiefly, as so often in Scotland, by stone
walls; and these s