es
that may deliver him from the calculable results of that position. Let
him live outside his income, or shirk the resolute honest work that
brings wages, and he will presently find himself dreaming of a possible
benefactor, a possible simpleton who may be cajoled into using his
interest, a possible state of mind in some possible person not yet
forthcoming. Let him neglect the responsibilities of his office, and he
will inevitably anchor himself on the chance that the thing left undone
may turn out not to be of the supposed importance. Let him betray his
friend's confidence, and he will adore that same cunning complexity
called Chance, which gives him the hope that his friend will never
know. Let him forsake a decent craft that he may pursue the
gentilities of a profession to which nature never called him, and his
religion will infallibly be the worship of blessed Chance, which he
will believe in as the mighty creator of success. The evil principle
deprecated in that religion is the orderly sequence by which the seed
brings forth a crop after its kind.

CHAPTER X

Justice Malam was naturally regarded in Tarley and Raveloe as a man of
capacious mind, seeing that he could draw much wider conclusions
without evidence than could be expected of his neighbours who were not
on the Commission of the Peace. Such a man was not likely to neglect
the clue of the tinder-box, and an inquiry was set on foot concerning a
pedlar, name unknown, with curly black hair and a foreign complexion,
carrying a box of cutlery and jewellery, and wearing large rings in his
ears. But either because inquiry was too slow-footed to overtake him,
or because the description applied to so many pedlars that inquiry did
not know how to choose among them, weeks passed away, and there was no
other result concerning the robbery than a gradual cessation of the
excitement it had caused in Raveloe. Dunstan Cass's absence was hardly
a subject of remark: he had once before had a quarrel with his father,
and had gone off, nobody knew whither, to return at the end of six
weeks, take up his old quarters unforbidden, and swagger as usual. His
own family, who equally expected this issue, with the sole difference
that the Squire was determined this time to forbid him the old
quarters, never mentioned his absence; and when his uncle Kimble or Mr.
Osgood noticed it, the story of his having killed Wildfire, and
committed some offence against his father, was e