are a matter of opinion. I have mine. And now
don't you think we had better go to bed? The doctors and Betty are going
to stop up all night with Mr. Bingham and Beatrice."

"Yes, Elizabeth, I suppose that we had better go. I am sure we have much
to be thankful for to-night. What a merciful deliverance! And if poor
Beatrice had gone the parish must have found another schoolmistress, and
it would have meant that we lost the salary. We have a great deal to be
thankful for, Elizabeth."

"Yes," said Elizabeth, very deliberately, "we have."

CHAPTER VI

OWEN DAVIES AT HOME

Owen Davies tramped along the cliff with a light heart. The wild lashing
of the rain and the roaring of the wind did not disturb him in the
least. They were disagreeable, but he accepted them as he accepted
existence and all its vanities, without remark or mental comment. There
is a class of mind of which this is the prevailing attitude. Very
early in their span of life, those endowed with such a mind come to the
conclusion that the world is too much for them. They cannot understand
it, so they abandon the attempt, and, as a consequence, in their own
torpid way they are among the happiest and most contented of men.
Problems, on which persons of keener intelligence and more aspiring soul
fret and foam their lives away as rushing water round a rock, do not
even break the placid surface of their days. Such men slip past them.
They look out upon the stars and read of the mystery of the universe
speeding on for ever through the limitless wastes of space, and are not
astonished. In their childhood they were taught that God made the sun
and the stars to give light on the earth; that is enough for them. And
so it is with everything. Poverty and suffering; war, pestilence, and
the inequalities of fate; madness, life and death, and the spiritual
wonders that hedge in our being, are things not to be inquired into but
accepted. So they accept them as they do their dinner or a tradesman's
circular.

In some cases this mental state has its root in deep and simple
religious convictions, and in some it springs from a preponderance
of healthful animal instincts over the higher but more troublesome
spiritual parts. The ox chewing the cud in the fresh meadow does not
muse upon the past and future, and the gull blown like a foam-flake out
against the sunset, does not know the splendour of the sky and sea.
Even the savage is not much troubled about the scheme of th