Again now saw and knew the
things which prophets and kings desire to look into.

He had lived for many years thus. He was a widower living with a married
daughter, whose husband was a fisherman. She herself kept a
greengrocer's shop of the poorer kind. She had five children, the
eldest, a boy of thirteen, earning his living with her in the shop. He
and his blind grandfather went round the district every day with a small
cart and horse, selling their vegetables from house to house and thus
enlarging their custom. The boy guided the horse and his grandfather
helped with the selling and the money. In the early morning at the end
of each week they drove the horse and cart to the sea's edge to wash
them, making always for the steady channel which ran unaltering through
the empty sand, when the tide was down. This morning they had gone as
usual, and when they reached the water (the old man was blind you will
remember, and his companion a child), they knew no difference in its
appearance. A man who was gathering cockles at a distance knew and
called to them, running towards them, but the old man did not see and
the boy was intent upon guiding the horse and cart into the water.

That night the sand, so unstable, had moved beneath the pressure of an
unusual tide. The course of the channel had changed, and when the horse,
treading confidently, had approached the edge, it stepped straight into
deep water and, losing its balance, being also impeded by the cart,
dragged with it the vehicle, the old blind man and the child to
unavoidable death. Their bodies had been recovered but too late. "Let us
pray," added the minister, "for the mourners."

To a child the fact of death is not very terrible, because the fact of
life is not yet understood; but I never see in imagination the level and
sad-coloured country of my childhood, stretching out of sight to the sea
across an expanse of sand, a country whose pomp was in the heavens,
whose hills were the clouds, without seeing also, journeying across it,
an old blind man, a child, and a dumb creature, to disappear for ever
under the wide sky, beneath the sun, within that great waste of waters.

The life of the poor, coloured outwardly with the same passivity and
acceptance of their lot as the rest of visible nature, disciplined by
the same forces which break the floods and the earth, remains for most
of us querulous, ignoble, disappointing. What can be said suggestive or
profound of the lif