people have been the better of it; for he alone can caress his people's
souls who has felt the caress of His father's love. God's tenderness is
the great contagion for the healing of life's long disease.

VIII

"_A NEW FOOT on The FLOOR_"

When our daughter (are there any two other words so well-wed as these?
What music their union makes!) was only about ten years old, her mother,
which is my wife writ large and heavenly, and I were taking tea at
Inglewood, which my long-suffering readers will remember as the home
which first welcomed me to New Jedboro and the residence of Mr. Michael
Blake. When our meal was over, Mr. Blake and I were enjoying a quiet
game of billiards, which was a game I loved. But I may have more to say
about this later on, for so had some of my pious people, though I am
inclined to think that they objected not so much because they thought
the game was wrong as because they feared I was enjoying it. For, to
some truly good Scotch folk the measure of enjoyableness is the measure
of sin, and a thing needeth no greater fault than to be guilty of
deliciousness. But the converse of this they also hold as true, namely,
that what maketh miserable is of God, and to be wretched is to be pious
at the heart. For which reason, I have observed oftentimes, they deem
that to be a truly well-spent Sabbath day which had banished all
possible happiness from their children's lives, bringing them to its
close limp and cramped and sore, but catechism-full and with a good mark
in the book of life for every weary hour.

Was it Johnson who ventured the opinion that the Puritans put
bear-baiting under the ban, not because it was painful to the bears but
because it was pleasant to the people? Whether it was or no, I shall not
discuss it. Neither shall I discuss the ethics of billiards, unless it
be to say this much, that if there be games in heaven, I do not doubt it
will have an honoured place, for it is an ivory game and truthful,
abhorring vagrant luck and scoring only by eternal laws which Euclid
made his own. And I make no doubt that many a hand hath plied the
billiard cue which long ere this hath touched with its finger-tips the
ivory gates and golden.

But to return. We were in the very midst of our game, of which I
remember very little, often and often though I have tried to recall
every feature of that eventful night. But I do recall that we spoke
about our Margaret, and there was a deep strain of wistf