mountain pass; tether the pony, sit on a plaid
shawl thrown over a boulder, and feast their eyes on green
mountain-shoulders reared against the pale blue sky; or gaze across
ravines not unworthy of Switzerland. Or they would put up pony and
cart at some village inn, explore old battlemented churches and
churchyards with seventeenth and eighteenth century headstones, so
far more tasteful and seemly than the hideous death memorials of the
nineteenth century. And ever and again the old father, looking more
and more like a Druid, would recite that charming Spring song, the
104th Psalm; or fragments of Welsh poetry sounding very good in
Welsh--as no doubt Greek poetry does in properly pronounced Greek,
but being singularly bald and vague in its references to earth, sea,
sky and flora when translated into plain English.

David expressed some such opinions which rather scandalized his
father who had grown up in the conventional school of unbounded,
unreasoning reverence for the Hebrew, Greek and Keltic classics.
From that they passed to the great problems, the undeterminable
problems of the Universe; the awful littleness of men--mere lice,
perhaps, on the scurfy body of a shrinking, dying planet of a
fifth-rate sun, one of a billion other suns. The Revd. Howel like
most of the Christian clergy of all times of course never looked at
the midnight sky or gave any thought to the terrors and mysteries of
astronomy, a science so modern, in fact, that it only came into real
existence two or three hundred years ago; and is even now only taken
seriously by about ten thousand people in Europe and America. Where,
in this measureless universe--which indeed might only be one of
several universes--was God to be found? A God that had been upset by
the dietary of a small desert tribe, who fussed over burnt
sacrifices and the fat of rams at one time; at another objected to
censuses; at another and a later date wanted a human sacrifice to
placate his wrath; or who had washed out the world's fauna and flora
in a flood which had left no geological evidence to attest its
having taken place. "Did you ever think about the Dinosaurs,
father?" said David at the end of some such tirade--an outburst of
free-thinking which in earlier years might have upset that father to
wrath and angry protest, but which now for some reason only left him
dazed and absent-minded. (It was the Colonies that had done it, he
thought, and the studio talk of that dilettante