h. By all recognised
precedent he ought to have failed in arriving. I will not say he
succeeded; but he himself was well content with the result. It is true
that in all his desert-wanderings he never lost the chart and compass
with which Methodism had once provided him; but he filled in the chart
at points where Methodism had left it blank, and put the compass to uses
which were not contemplated by the original makers.

For many years before his death Snarley entered neither the church nor
the chapel; and, I regret to say, he had a very low opinion of both.
This was one of the few matters on which he and Hankin were agreed,
though for opposite reasons. Hankin objected to these institutions
because they went too far; Snarley because they went not nearly far
enough. It may, however, be noted that in the tap-room of the Nag's
Head, where the blasphemy of the Divine name was a normal occurrence,
Snarley, of whose displeasure everybody went in fear, would never allow
the name of Christ to be so much as mentioned, not even argumentatively
by Hankin; and once when a foul-mouthed navvy had used the name as part
of some filthy oath, Snarley instantly challenged the man to fight,
struck him a fearful blow between the eyes and pitched him headlong,
with a shattered face, into the village street. But in the matter of
contempt for the religious practice of his neighbours, his attitude was,
if possible, more extreme than Hankin's. I need not quote his utterances
on these matters; except for their unusual violence, they were
sufficiently commonplace. Had Snarley been more highly developed as "a
social being" he would, no doubt, have been less intolerant; but
solitude had made him blind on that side of his nature; for his
fellow-men in general he had little sympathy and less admiration, his
soul being as lonely as his body when wandering before the dawn on some
upland waste.

Lonely, save for the frequent presence, by day and night, of his ghostly
monitor and friend. To understand the nature of this companionship we
must remember that devotion to the shepherd's craft was the controlling
principle of Snarley's being. Had he been able to philosophise on the
basis of his experience, he would have found it impossible to represent
perfection as grounded otherwise than on a supreme skill in the breeding
and management of sheep. No being, in his view of things, could wear the
title of "good Shepherd" for any other reason. Taking Snarley all