it difficult to
answer. He was by no means imbued with the missionary spirit just then;
his experience at Chatsea had made him pessimistic about missionary
effort in the Church of England. If a man like Father Rowley had failed
to win the support of his ecclesiastical superiors, Mark, who possessed
more humility than is usual at twenty-one, did not fancy that he should
be successful. The ambition to become a friar was revived by an
incomprehensible, or if not incomprehensible, certainly by an
inexplicable impulse to put himself in tune with the landscape, to
proclaim as it were on behalf of that dumb heart of England beating down
there in the flowery Vale of Wield: _God rest you merry gentlemen, let
nothing you dismay!_ There was revealed to him with the assurance of
absolute faith that all the sorrows, all the ugliness, all the
soullessness (no other word could be found) of England in the first year
of the twentieth century was due to the Reformation; the desire to
become a preaching friar was the dramatic expression of this inspired
conviction. Before his journey through the Vale of Wield Mark in any
discussion would have been ready to argue the mistake of the
Reformation: but now there was no longer room for argument. What
formerly he thought now he knew. The song of the yellow-hammer was
louder in the quickset hedge; the trees burned with a sharper green; the
road urged his feet.

"If only everybody in England could move as I am moving now," he
thought. "If only I could be granted the power to show a few people, so
that they could show others, and those others show all the world. How
confidently that yellow-hammer repeats his song! How well he knows that
his song is right! How little he envies the linnet and how little the
linnet envies him! The fools that talk of nature's cruelty, the blind
fatuous sentimental coxcombs!"

Thus apostrophizing, Mark came to a wayside inn; discovering that he was
hungry, he took his seat at a rustic table outside and called for bread
and cheese and beer. While he was eating, a vehicle approached from the
direction in which he would soon be travelling. He took it at first for
a caravan of gipsies, but when it grew near he saw that it was painted
over with minatory texts and was evidently the vehicle of itinerant
gospellers. Two young men alighted from the caravan when it pulled up
before the door of the inn. They were long-nosed sallow creatures with
that expression of complacency wh