y could
live out a peaceful and innocent life, but into the midst of dangers
and miseries. Sometimes, beneath his windows, he could see a shoal of
little fish flick from the water in all directions at the rush of a
pike, one of them no doubt horribly engulphed in the monster's jaws.

Why was so hard a price to be paid for the delightful privilege of
life? Was it indifference or carelessness, as a child might make a
toy, and weary of it? It seemed like it, though Hugh could not bear to
think that it was so; and yet for thousands of centuries the same thing
had been going on all over the world, and no one seemed an inch nearer
to the mystery of it all. How such thoughts seemed to shrivel into
nothing the voluble religious systems that professed to explain it all!
The misery of it was that, here and everywhere, God seemed to be
explaining it Himself every day and hour, and yet one missed the
connection which could make it all intelligible--the connection, that
is, between God, as man in his heart conceived of Him, and God as He
wrote Himself large in every field and wood. On what hypothesis of
pure benevolence and perfect justice could all these restless lives, so
full of pain and suffering, and all alike ending in death and
disappearance, be explained?

Yet, stranger still, the mystery did not make him exactly unhappy. The
fresh breeze blew through the trees, the flowers blazed and shone in
the steady sun, the intricate lawns lay shimmering among the
shrubberies, and Hugh seemed full of a baffling and baffled joy. At
that moment, at all events, God wished him well, and spread for him the
exquisite pageant of life and colour and scent; the very sunshine stole
like some liquid essence along his veins, and filled him with
unreasoning happiness. And yet he too was encompassed by a thousand
dangers; there were a hundred avenues of sense, of emotion, by which
some dark messenger might steal upon him. Perhaps he lurked behind the
trees of that sweet paradise, biding his time to come forth. But
to-day it seemed a species of treachery to feel that anything but
active love and perfect benevolence was behind these smiling flowers,
those tall trees rippling in the breeze, that lucent sky. To-day at
least it seemed God's will that he should be filled with peaceful
content and gratitude. He would drink the cup of sweetness to-day
without retrospect or misgiving. Would the memory of that sweetness
stay his heart, and sust