ere Heaven did not show the right? It was confusing
and alarming, for both those boys sat staring at me as if I could
answer them; and those wonderful searching eyes of Leonard's were
fixed, as if his whole acquiescence in the dealings of Providence were
going to depend on the reply, that could but be unsatisfactory. I
could only try plunging deep. I said it was Job's difficulty, and it
was a new light to Leonard that Job was about anything but patience.
He has been reading the Book all this Sunday evening; and is not De
Wilton a curious introduction to it? But Aubrey knew that I meant the
bewilderment of having yet to discover that Divine Justice is
longer-sighted than human justice, and he cited the perplexities of
high-minded heathen. Thence we came to the Christian certainty that
"to do well and suffer for it is thankworthy;" and that though no
mortal man can be so innocent as to feel any infliction wholly
unmerited and disproportioned, yet human injustice at its worst may be
working for the sufferer an exceeding weight of glory, or preparing him
for some high commission below. Was not Ralph de Wilton far nobler and
purer as the poor palmer, than as Henry the Eighth's courtier! And if
you could but have heard our sequel, arranging his orthodoxy, his
Scripture reading, and his guardianship of distressed monks and nuns,
you would have thought he had travelled to some purpose, only he would
certainly have been burnt by one party, and beheaded by the other. On
the whole, I think Leonard was a little comforted, and I cannot help
hoping that the first apparently cruel wrong that comes before him may
be the less terrible shock to his faith from his having been set to
think out the question by "but half a robber and but half a knight."'

* * * * *

'August 1st.--Yesterday afternoon we three were in our private
geological treasury, Leonard making a spread-eagle of himself in an
impossible place on the cliff side, trying to disinter what hope,
springing eternal in the human breast, pronounced to be the paddle of a
saurian; Aubrey, climbing as high as he durst, directing operations and
making discoveries; I, upon a ledge half-way up, guarding Mab and
poking in the debris, when one of the bridal pairs, with whom the place
is infested, was seen questing about as if disposed to invade our
premises. Aubrey, reconnoitring in high dudgeon, sarcastically
observed that all red-haired men are so much