is
convenient, and unity between the same when we find unity convenient.
This is illogical, but extremes are alone logical, and they are always
absurd, the mean is alone practicable and it is always illogical. It is
faith and not logic which is the supreme arbiter. They say all roads
lead to Rome, and all philosophies that I have ever seen lead ultimately
either to some gross absurdity, or else to the conclusion already more
than once insisted on in these pages, that the just shall live by faith,
that is to say that sensible people will get through life by rule of
thumb as they may interpret it most conveniently without asking too many
questions for conscience sake. Take any fact, and reason upon it to the
bitter end, and it will ere long lead to this as the only refuge from
some palpable folly.

But to return to my story. When Ernest got to the top of the street and
looked back, he saw the grimy, sullen walls of his prison filling up the
end of it. He paused for a minute or two. "There," he said to himself,
"I was hemmed in by bolts which I could see and touch; here I am barred
by others which are none the less real--poverty and ignorance of the
world. It was no part of my business to try to break the material bolts
of iron and escape from prison, but now that I am free I must surely seek
to break these others."

He had read somewhere of a prisoner who had made his escape by cutting up
his bedstead with an iron spoon. He admired and marvelled at the man's
mind, but could not even try to imitate him; in the presence of
immaterial barriers, however, he was not so easily daunted, and felt as
though, even if the bed were iron and the spoon a wooden one, he could
find some means of making the wood cut the iron sooner or later.

He turned his back upon Eyre Street Hill and walked down Leather Lane
into Holborn. Each step he took, each face or object that he knew,
helped at once to link him on to the life he had led before his
imprisonment, and at the same time to make him feel how completely that
imprisonment had cut his life into two parts, the one of which could bear
no resemblance to the other.

He passed down Fetter Lane into Fleet Street and so to the Temple, to
which I had just returned from my summer holiday. It was about half past
nine, and I was having my breakfast, when I heard a timid knock at the
door and opened it to find Ernest.

CHAPTER LXX

I had begun to like him on the night Townele