how
at last the man who thinks he will conquer a continent has to be
content with the conquest of his own kitchen-garden, fifty feet by
twenty. She knew this in her own humble way, although her ambition, so
far from being continental, had never extended even to a parish. She,
however, could do Miriam no good. She had learned how to vanquish her
own trouble, but she was powerless against the very same trouble in
another person. She had the sense, too, for she was no bigot, to see
her helplessness, and she gave Miriam the best of all advice--to go
home to Cowfold. Alpine air, Italian cities, would perhaps have been
better, bat as these were impossible, Cowfold was the next best.
Perhaps the worst effect of great cities, at any rate of English
cities, is not the poverty they create and the misery which it brings,
but the mental mischief which is wrought, often unconsciously, by their
dreariness and darkness. In Pimlico or Bethnal Green a man might have
a fortune given him, and it would not stir him to so much gratitude as
an orange if he were living on the South Downs, and the peculiar
sourness of modern democracy is due perhaps to deficiency of oxygen and
sunlight. Miriam had no objection to return. She was beaten and
indifferent; her father and mother wrote to welcome her, and she
recollected her mother's devotion to her when she was ill. She had not
the heart to travel by the road on which she and Andrew came to London,
and she chose a longer route by which she was brought to a point about
ten miles from Cowfold. She found affection and peace, and Andrew, who
had lost his taste for whisky, was quietly at work in his father's shop
at his old trade. There was at the same time no vacant space for her
in the household. There was nothing particular for her to do, and
after a while, when the novelty of return had worn off, she grew weary,
and longed unconsciously for something on which fully to exercise her
useless strength.

In Cowfold at that time dwelt a basketmaker named Didymus Farrow. Why
he was called Didymus is a very simple story.

His mother had once heard a sermon preached by a bishop from the text,
"Then said Thomas, which is called Didymus, unto his fellow-disciples,
Let us also go, that we may die with Him." The preacher enlarged on
the blessed privilege offered by our Lord, and observed how happy he
should have been--how happy all his dear brethren in Christ would have
been, if the same privileg