ained in the landscape. The herbs in the grass,
wild-thyme, wild-balm, and star-flowered camomile, smelt strongly
aromatic as she trod them under foot, while the beds of bracken, dried
and yellowed by the drought, gave off a sharp, woody scent.

Usually, when thus alone and in contact with nature, such matters
claimed Honoria's whole attention, ministering to her love of
earth-lore and of Mother Earth--producing in her silent worship of
those primitive deities who at once preside over and inhabit the
waste-land and the tilth, the untamed forest and the pastures where
heavy-uddered, sweet-breathed cows lie in the deep, meadow grass, the
garden ground, all pleasant, orchard places, and the broad promise of
the waving crops. But this afternoon, although the colour, odour,
warmth, and all the many voices praising the refreshment of the rain,
were sensibly present to her, Honoria's thought failed to be engrossed
by them. For she was in process of worshipping younger and more
compassionate deities, sadder, because more human, ones, whose office
lies not with Nature in her eternal repose and fecundity but with man
in his eternal failure and unrest. Not august Ceres, giver of the
golden harvest-fields, or fierce Cybele, the goddess of the many paps,
but spare, brown-habited St. Francis, serving his brethren with
bleeding hands and feet, held empire over her meditations.--In
imagination she saw--saw with only too lively realisation of
detail--that eighteen-year-old lad, in the factory at Westchurch, drawn
up--all the unspent hopes and pleasures of his young manhood active in
him--by the loose gearing, into the merciless vortex of revolving
wheels, and there, without preparation, without pause of warning,
without any dignity of shouting multitude, of arena or of stake,
martyred--converted in a few horrible seconds from health and wholeness
into a formless lump of human waste. And up and down the land, as she
reflected, wherever the great systems of trade and labour, which build
up the mechanical and material prosperity of our day, go forward,
kindred things happen--let alone question of all those persons who are
born into the world already injured, or bearing the seeds of foul and
disfiguring diseases in their organs and their blood.--Verily Richard
Calmady's sad family was a rather terribly large one, well calculated
to maintain its numbers, even to increase! For neither the age of human
sacrifice nor of cannibalism is really ov