ollowed us a little way. "Do we
belong to your party, sir, or do you belong to ours?" said Father Payne.
The dog put his head on one side, and wagged his tail. "It appears I have
the pleasure of your acquaintance!" said Father Payne to him. "Very well,
you can set us on our way if you like!" The dog gave a short shrill bark,
and trotted along with us. When we got to the end of the lane, where it
turned into the high road, Father Payne said to the dog, "Now, sir, I
expect that's all the time you can spare this morning? You must go back and
guard the house, and be a faithful dog. Duty first!" The dog looked
mournfully at us, and wagged his tail, but did not attempt to come farther.
He watched us for a little longer, but as we did not invite him to come on,
he presently turned round and trotted off home. "Now, that's the sort of
case where I feel sentimental," said Father Payne. "It's the sham sort of
pathos. I hate to see anyone disappointed. A person offering flowers in the
street for sale, and people not buying them--the men in London showing off
little toys by the pavement, which nobody wants--I can't bear that. It
makes me feel absurdly wretched to see anyone hoping to please, and not
pleasing. And if the people who do it look old and frail and unhappy, I'm
capable of buying the whole stock. The great uncomforted! It's silly, of
course, and there is nothing in the world so silly as useless emotion! It
is so easy to overflow with cheap benevolence, but the first step towards
the joyful wisdom is to be afraid of the emotion that costs you nothing:
but we won't be metaphysical to-day!"

Presently Father Payne insisted on sitting down in a sheltered place. He
flung his hat off, and sate there, looking round him with a smile, his arms
clasped round his big knees. "Well," he said, "it's a jolly place, the old
world, to be sure! Plenty of nasty and ugly things, I suppose, going on in
corners; but if you look round, they are only a small percentage of the
happy things. They don't force themselves upon the eye and ear, the beastly
things: and it's a stupid and faithless mistake to fix the imagination and
the reason too much upon them. We are all of us in a tight place
occasionally, and we have to meet it as best we can. But I don't think we
do it any better by anticipating it beforehand. What is more, no one can
really help us or deliver us: we can be made a little more comfortable, and
that's all, by what they call cooling drin