it would die. I am most eager to see this new
development."

"I haven't heard. It confounded Crashaw, you say? And it cannot be more
than four or five years old now?"

"Four; four and a half," returned Challis, and then the conversation was
interrupted by the necessity of skirting a tiny morass of wet leaf-mould
that lay in a hollow.

"Confounded Crashaw? I should think so," Challis went on, when they had
found firm going again. "The good man would not soil his devoted tongue
by any condescension to oratio recta, but I gathered that the child had
made light of his divine authority."

"Great Caesar!" ejaculated Lewes; "but that is immense. What did Crashaw
do--shake him?"

"No; he certainly did not lay hands on him at all. His own expression
was that he did not know how it was he did not do the child an injury.
That is one of the things that interest me enormously. That power I
spoke of must have been retained. Crashaw must have been blue with
anger; he could hardly repeat the story to me, he was so agitated. It
would have surprised me less if he had told me he had murdered the
child. That I could have understood, perfectly."

"It is, of course, quite incomprehensible to me, as yet," commented
Lewes.

When they came out of the woods on to the stretch of common from which
you can see the great swelling undulations of the Hampden Hills, Challis
stopped. A spear of April sunshine had pierced the load of cloud towards
the west, and the bank of wood behind them gave shelter from the cold
wind that had blown fiercely all the afternoon.

"It is a fine prospect," said Challis, with a sweep of his hand. "I
sometimes feel, Lewes, that we are over-intent on our own little narrow
interests. Here are you and I, busying ourselves in an attempt to throw
some little light--a very little it must be--on some petty problems of
the origin of our race. We are looking downwards, downwards always;
digging in old muck-heaps; raking up all kinds of unsavoury rubbish to
prove that we are born out of the dirt. And we have never a thought for
the future in all our work,--a future that may be glorious, who knows?
Here, perhaps in this village, insignificant from most points of view,
but set in a country that should teach us to raise our eyes from the
ground; here, in this tiny hamlet, is living a child who may become a
greater than Socrates or Shakespeare, a child who may revolutionise our
conceptions of time and space. There have been gre