r running
risks of fatigue and exhaustion which, in his case, were wholly
unnecessary.

"Yet if I were really poor," he argued with himself, "if I were in very
truth a tramp, I should have to do exactly what I am doing now. If one
man can stand 'life on the road,' so can another."

And he would not allow his mind to dwell on the fact that a temperament
which has become accustomed to every kind of comfort and luxury is
seldom fitted to endure privation. On he jogged steadily, and by and by
began to be entertained by his own thoughts as pleasantly as a poet or
romancist is entertained by the fancies which come and go in the brain
with all the vividness of dramatic reality. Yet always he found himself
harking back to what he sometimes called the "incurability" of life.
Over and over again he asked himself the old eternal question: Why so
much Product to end in Waste? Why are thousands of millions of worlds,
swarming with life-organisms, created to revolve in space, if there is
no other fate for them but final destruction?

"There _must_ be an Afterwards!" he said. "Otherwise Creation would not
only be a senseless joke, but a wicked one! Nay, it would almost be a
crime. To cause creatures to be born into existence without their own
consent, merely to destroy them utterly in a few years and make the fact
of their having lived purposeless, would be worse than the dreams of
madmen. For what is the use of bringing human creatures into the world
to suffer pain, sickness, and sorrow, if mere life-torture is all we can
give them, and death is the only end?"

Here his meditations were broken in upon by the sound of a horse's hoofs
trotting briskly behind him, and pausing, he saw a neat little cart and
pony coming along, driven by a buxom-looking woman with a brown sun-hat
tied on in the old-fashioned manner under her chin.

"Would ye like a lift?" she asked. "It's mighty warm walkin'."

Helmsley raised his eyes to the sun-bonnet, and smiled at the cheerful
freckled face beneath its brim.

"You're very kind----" he began.

"Jump in!" said the woman. "I'm taking cream and cheeses into Watchett,
but it's a light load, an' Jim an' me can do with ye that far. This is
Jim."

She flicked the pony's ears with her whip by way of introducing the
animal, and Helmsley clambered up into the cart beside her.

"That's a nice little dog you've got," she remarked, as Charlie perked
his small black nose out from under his protector's arm