s
no dead thing that must be kept ever sheltered from the air, lest it
crumble.

One evening "Who are we that we should live?" cried Hal. "The spider
is less cruel; the very pig less greedy, gluttonous and foul; the tiger
less tigerish; our cousin ape less monkeyish. What are we but savages,
clothed and ashamed, nine-tenths of us?"

"But Sodom and Gomorrah," reminded him my mother, "would have been
spared for the sake of ten just men."

"Much more sensible to have hurried the ten men out, leaving the
remainder to be buried with all their abominations under their own
ashes," growled Hal.

"And we shall be purified," continued my mother, "the evil in us washed
away."

"Why have made us ill merely to mend us? If the Almighty were so anxious
for our company, why not have made us decent in the beginning?" He had
just come away from a meeting of Poor Law Guardians, and was in a state
of dissatisfaction with human nature generally.

"It is His way," answered my mother. "The precious stone lies hid in
clay. He has His purpose."

"Is the stone so very precious?"

"Would He have taken so much pains to fashion it if it were not? You see
it all around you, Hal, in your daily practice--heroism, self-sacrifice,
love stronger than death. Can you think He will waste it, He who uses
again even the dead leaf?"

"Shall the new leaf remember the new flower?"

"Yes, if it ever knew it. Shall memory be the only thing to die?"

Often of an evening I would accompany Hal upon his rounds. By the savage
tribe he both served and ruled he had come to be regarded as medicine
man and priest combined. He was both their tyrant and their slave,
working for them early and late, yet bullying them unmercifully,
enforcing his commands sometimes with vehement tongue, and where that
would not suffice with quick fists; the counsellor, helper, ruler,
literally of thousands. Of income he could have made barely enough to
live upon; but few men could have enjoyed more sense of power; and that
I think it was that held him to the neighbourhood.

"Nature laid me by and forgot me for a couple of thousand years," was
his own explanation of himself. "Born in my proper period, I should have
climbed to chieftainship upon uplifted shields. I might have been an
Attila, an Alaric. Among the civilised one can only climb by crawling,
and I am too impatient to crawl. Here I am king at once by force of
brain and muscle." So in Poplar he remained, poor in fees but