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What did give Sam a real thrill of natural pleasure was the scrubbing and the whitewashing of his loft floor at the top of the Old Malt House. He had no furniture here at all except a small camp-bed, a kitchen chair, a three-legged table and a white thick water-jug and basin. When he had whitewashed the walls and ceiling, he scrubbed the big bare beams of the oak floor till they were as clean as the cleanest floor-expanse in the town, that is to say, Emma Sly's kitchen at The Elms.

As day followed day in Sam's new life, finding him working from seven to five at clay-hauling and then associating, when his work was over, with the most destitute of his neighbours, the full implication of his abandonment of the normal human desires began to unfold. He was so strong, and his health was so sound, that he very quickly found his day's labour no more exhausting to him than if he had spent the time walking about the fields.

This growing freedom from physical weariness made it possible for him, after he had washed himself and changed his clothes and had his tea, to explore many of the poorer districts of the town of which he already knew a little. He would leave Manor House Road about half-past six and make his way through a small alley, by the side of the house where John and Mary lived, into a section of Paradise that abutted upon the Burnham and Evercreech Railway and stretched as far to the north as the four crossways, where the roads to Meare and Godney met North-load Street and Dye House Lane.

That Holy Sam, as even the children of this quarter already began to call him, had an equanimity of temper beyond what many holy men have had, was proved by the way he let himself be interrupted upon at least three week-days out of his six, as he sat down to his well-earned tea in his white-washed attic loft. This interruption came from Jimmy Bagge, a semi-imbecile beggar, a little older than Sam, who lived with his father and mother in a one-storied stone house, black with age and smoke, that leaned against the bank of the Evercreech Railway. Sam had found Jimmy scraping and groping in a filthy refuse-heap behind the NoTthload houses and he had brought him home with him Lo Manor House Lane and given him a supper of hot tea and bread and treacle. After this Jimmy Bagge soon found out how long Sam worked and the exact hour of his return home; and he used to sit in the malt-yard, hidden behind a row of ancient barrels between which he constantly peeped out.

He was too wise to present himself ere Sam had washed, changed his clothes and made tea; but he had timed these proceedings to such a nicety that it was pretty well almost always just as Sam was lifting his first cup to his lips thai Jimmy knocked at his door. Sam accepted the situation as if it were his destiny to spend his life with Jimmy, as indeed perhaps it was, but he displayed one small weakness on all these occasions, which betrayed the difference between an Anglo-Saxon “holy man” and one of Latin or Oriental blood; for he gave up his one chair to his visitor, and himself sat down on his camp-bed; not, it must be confessed out of politeness, but with an irrepressible awareness of the verminous condition of the beggar's filthy clothes.

It was on the occasion of the fifth visit of Jimmy Bagge to the Malt House loft floor that the obstinate imbecile suggested, after many wavering circumlocutions, that Sam should accompany him to his home beneath the Evercreech railway bank. It was a lovely evening when the two men set out together with this purpose in view, and Sam could not help thinking, as he walked along by his new friend's side, of a certain curious change that had taken place in his recent responses to the visible world.

The back gardens of Northload Street sloped down into a region of desolate and forlorn litter where those warm and mellow brick tiles for which Glastonbury is famous gave place to an older style of roofing, of dull grey, moss-patched slate. As he glanced about him he felt a slight touch again of this new sensation he had been receiving lately. What he felt was a strange and singular reciprocity between his soul and every little fragment of masonry, of stony ground, of mossy ground, of woodwork, of trodden mud, of clumps of last year's dusty nettles, of withered dock leaves or of mildewed palings.

It is true that to the intellectual eyes of oriental spirituality, or of Latin devotion, Sam's attempts at living the ideal life would have seemed like those of an ascetic schoolmaster or a priggish boy scout, childish, and lacking in maturity, dignity, subtlety, and intellectual passion. SanVs whole system of moral values—his puritanical stress upon sexual restraint his fidgetty preoccupation with isolated acts of benevolence—would have seemed to a Celtic or Latin nature a form of tiresome and Pharisaic fussiness, more akin to the pragmatic virtue of some modern lay-brother than to the sublime heroism of real medisevaZ sanctity. Nevertheless, to the Invisible Observers of the magic-charged atmosphere of Glastonbury this resolute and sturdy descendant of Somersetshire yeomen displayed a certain humble simplicity and a certain stolid good-humoured piety that rendered many more picturesque struggles to live the saintly life appear trickily theatrical and even self-deceiving in comparison!

And certainly on this particular evening as he adapted his pace to the shuffling and shambling gait of Jimmy Bagge, Sam began to be aware that some subtle barrier between his inmost being and certain particular objects in Nature had begun to give way. The truth was that without being in the least conscious of the importance for humanity of the psychic law he had blundered upon or of its rarity in the world, Sam had found out that when a person is liberated from possessiveness, from ambition, from the exigencies of desire, from domestic claims, from every sort of authority over others, he can enjoy sideways and incidentally, as he follows any sort of labour or quest the most exquisite trances of absorption into the mysterious essence of any patch of earth-mould, or any fragment of gravel, or any slab of paving-stone, or any tangle of weeds, or any lump of turf that he may come upon as he goes along.

There is always a peculiar pleasure in arriving suddenly through a narrow aperture between masses of masonry at some wide-open expanse; and this is especially the case in the evening twilight and when such an expanse opens out towards the west. The misty glow, filtering through the smouldering ditch-vapours of this open ground, as Sam saw it tonight, lifted into a grandiose and dusky importance every pigsty, every stickhouse, every pigeon-tower, every hovel-roof; and under a stone arch where the muddy path they followed dived beneath the railway Sam could see, as they approached the dwelling of Jimmy's aged parents, a great red semi-cirque, like a huge blood-stained mushroom, which was the setting sun!

His father's arch-enemy was too close upon his own dissolution over the rim of the planet to throw out any magnetic power, whether good or bad; but to see him like this at all, as Sam descending from the ramparted greyness of that gap in Northload Street saw that crimson half-circle, was as if a person saw the sinking head of some titanic invader retreating from a threatened city.

Such is the human mind—or at least such is the mind of a son of Somersetshire clay fumbling towards a holy life—that Sam's consciousness gave a momentary harbourage to the unsanctified thought that he was glad that his present companion's rags had not touched his camp-bed; but, like a black fly that lodges for a second upon the shaft of a moving wagon, this thought was quickly lost in the outstretched solemnity of that evening scene.

“Fayther be a turble stark man for a bed-rid,” remarked Jimmy Bagge, “ 'a do eat and drink, Fayther do, all there be, when there be any! Mum be a thinned-out ghosty compared wi' he.”

The imbecile paused for a moment and looked at the crimson half-sun as it went down under the moss-wet stone arch, the walls of which seemed to drip with a moisture that was neither rain nor dew, but rather some malady-sweat of its own private enduring.

“Mum do sarve he for nothink and it be a pity to see such sarvice. He do lie and eat; and her do wear 'erself to bone feeding he! I be afeared of he just as Mum be; but Finn Toller, whzt be Mum's nephy, baint afeared of he. Mum do send I to fetch Finn Toller and when Fayther do zee 'un cooming oop path through chink o' windy, 'a do beller and holler, awful vor to hear. 'A do zay, cthik Codfin be come to murder I,' and 'a do hide 'isself under blanket.”

“Does your mother let Mr. Toller come in?” asked Sam.

Jimmy's countenance, which was as a rule as empty of intelligence as a washed-out signboard- emitted at that point a pallid ray of cunning, as if the wind-blown reflection of a streak of moonlight, caught in a rain tub, had been tossed upward upon that board.

“Mum do allus zay the seame. She do zay:—Thee's pore uncle be starvin', Codfin. Have 'ee got a bite o' summat for'n today?'”

“And what does Mr. Toller do then?”

“ 'A do empty his wallet on Fayther's bed and sometimes there be a girt hunk o' sweet Cheddar in 'un; but 'a never sits down for more'n a minute. 'I must be movin' on, Auntie,' ”a zays, and then 'a zays to Mum, lookin' at Fayther, wot's head be hid under blanket—Tve 'a jest coom from settlm.' woon account an' I be ponderin' in me mind about settlin' another. I be a grand settler of accounts, Auntie,' he says, and 'a looks, wi5 'is weepy eyes, at Fayther's blanket, till bed do creak, Fayther do shake so."

Once seated in that forlorn stone edifice, built long ago under the railway bank, it came over Sam with a weight like that of the first shovelful of earth thrown into an open grave, what kind of mental aura is projected in a given locality by experience of sheer physical want. Preparations had evidently been made for what in the Bagge menage passed for supper, for every object in that miserable room—the walls of bare stone, where patches of soot and grease and indecipherable and nameless stains alternated with greenish mould and oozing damp, the small smoky wood-fire under a great iron pot where steamed the most watery concoction ever wrung from the twice-boiled bones of a skinny rabbit, bare wooden chairs with their seats full of holes, a broken water-jug on the smoke-darkened chimney-piece,—seemed to group themselves round a piece of newspaper laid flat upon the table on which rested the half of a loaf and two small salted herrings.

A strong, bony face, angular as the face of a half-starved, overworked horse, did Mrs. Bagge turn towards the visitor while she settled herself on a wooden stool by the hearth and watched his movements as a hungry fieldfare, that bird of wintry bane, might sit with ruffled feathers watching an absent-minded tramp in the road-hedge. Her identity too, like that of the damp walls and the ricketty chairs and the innutritious liquid in the black pot, and the broken jug on the chimney-piece, seemed, even while she gazed at Sam, to yearn towards the half loaf and the two small fishes upon the outstretched newspaper.

And as for the figure in the bed under a patched blanket—the figure of the bed-ridden Thomas Bagge—its woebegone rapacious eyes seemed to point at these objects with the irreversible neces* sity of a compass needle pointing to the north.

Sam couldn't bear to think he was keeping them from this wretched meal, such as it was, but he, too, seemed to succumb to the hypnotic influence of that half loaf on the table. For nearly a quarter of an hour he murmured various broken comments upon the new Glastonbury government and the chances it offered of monetary advantage to the destitute.

The woman's interruptions were however entirely irrelevant to what he was saying. They seemed more like the feeble echoes of the mechanical chatter of a gipsy at a fair, and they kept referring to him as “the sweet lovely gentleman what be minded to make our Jimmy's fortune.” Once she jumped up from her stool and with a billet of wood snatched from the floor killed a large bug upon the sooty wall. But the piece of wood as she threw it down, and her stool as she took her seat again, and another bug observed by Sam that had escaped her gesture, all these things 6eemed to his mind to be focussed upon that half loaf and those wretched herrings.

Gazing at Mrs. Baggers hollow cheeks, scoriated neck, cavernous eye-sockets, Sam began to feel as if his attempts to understand the sufferings of a Promethean demi-god had hardly scratched the surface of the sufferings of his own human race; and he seemed to hear his “exterior soul” whispering in his ears that his tortured God was nothing less than a tortured humanity.

As he contemplated the damp stones so sooty and greasy and stained with nameless stains, above the woman's head, and as he looked at the bread upon the table, the two fundamental concepts—bread and stone—seemed to associate themselves with the concept suffering, as forming a sort of ultimate Trinity of Experience towards which he was being conducted. Thankless labour, eternal hunger, the deadening throb of a pain that refused to cease, if these things lived on and on in this room under the Evercreech Railway bank, why should he have been permitted to eat sweet treacle and to look out of his window from the top of the Old Malt House?

From the hollow eye-sockets of this woman his mind reverted to similar eye-sockets, and far worse ones than hers, that were at this very second in other parts of the world opening and contracting under the pressure of the cruelty of the First Cause.

Why didn't suffering carried to a certain point, why didn't pain carried to a certain point, simply kill their victims? And since they didn't, to what point must a person go, in sympathy for these things, who had, by pure accident, been spared their worst scrapings and scoopings?

As he went on mumbling about what the Glastonbury council would soon be doing for its poor, Sam's under-mind came to the conclusion that the most serious question of all questions was at what point, if life was to go on with any degree of endurance, is it necessary to harden our hearts and cease to think of the pain of others? Mathematicians talked of invisible “points,” of formal “points,” that were the pivots of all the vast spirals of reality. Here, in this question—how far must we share suffering? —had he touched the “point of points” round which all sensitised consciences revolved?

The vital common sense in Sam stirred up an interior honesty that told him he must draw back somewhere or the natural selfishness in him would rise like Enceladus and throw off all restraint. Did St. Francis stop in the midst of composing his Hymn to the Sun, to ponder on the problem of how far he ought, in place of giving himself up to such magical ecstasy, to visualise the fate of the tortured in that neighbouring stone tower and to ponder on what man at that point of time, was doing to man, in Algiers, in London, in Seville, in Trebizond, in Paris, and even in Assisi?