ocking feet,
hoping to be unobserved. Her father was working at his microscope: he
saw her, reached out one arm as she passed, drew her to him and kissed
her forehead. The little girl never again trespassed--how could she,
with the father that gave her only love! That there was no sternness in
this recognition of the value of the working hours is further indicated
in that little Francis, aged six, once put his head in the door and
offered the father a sixpence if he would come out and play in the
garden.

For several years Darwin was village magistrate. Most of the cases
brought before him were either for poaching or drunkenness. "He always
seemed to be trying to find an excuse for the prisoner, and usually
succeeded," says his son.

One time, when a prosecuting attorney complained because he had
discharged a prisoner, Darwin, who might have fined the impudent
attorney for contempt of court, merely said: "Why, he's as good as we
are. If tempted in the same way I am sure that I would have done as he
has done. We can't blame a man for doing what he has to do!" This was
poor reasoning from a legal point of view. Darwin afterward admitted
that he didn't hear much of the evidence, as his mind was full of
orchids, but the fellow looked sorry, and he really couldn't punish
anybody who had simply made a mistake. The local legal lights gradually
lost faith in Magistrate Darwin's peculiar brand of justice; he hadn't
much respect for law, and once when a lawyer cited him the criminal code
he said, "Tut, tut, that was made a hundred years ago!" Then he fined
the man five shillings, and paid the fine himself, when he should have
sent him to the workhouse for six months.

* * * * *

The men who have most benefited the world have, almost without
exception, been looked down upon by the priestly class. That is to say,
the men upon whose tombs society now carves the word Savior were
outcasts and criminals in their day.

In a society where the priest is regarded as the mouthpiece of divinity,
and therefore the highest type of man, the artist, the inventor, the
discoverer, the genius, the man of truth, has always been regarded as a
criminal. Society advances as it doubts the priest, distrusts his
oracles, and loses faith in his institution.

In the priest, at first, was deposited all human knowledge, and what he
did not know he pretended to know. He was the guardian of mind and
morals, and the cure of