“I shan’t do so with my father. He doesn’t read much, but he thinks, and has a good head.”

“There was fathers before yours, lad. You needn’t scorn your grandfather for your father.”

“Scorn you, grandfather! God forbid! Or, at least—”

“You don’t see what I’m driving at, sonny. I don’t mean me—I mean fathers of old, them that has handed down the old tales, even the old tales that you think you no longer believe and think are only old religious superstition. When an old tale comes to me from the faraway time, I don’t pitch it into the road, any more than I would an old key or an old shoe—a horseshoe, I mean. The story was something once, and it may be something again! I hang the one up, and turn the other over. And if you’re strong set on throwing either away, lad, you and me won’t blaze together like one flaming sword, but will be at odds before long. Nay, old ideas are for pondering, not discarding, lad.”

Richard held his peace. The old man had already impressed him. Even if he had not, like his son-in-law, bid good-bye to his religious fancies, there was a power in him that was not in his father—a power like that he found in his favourite books.

“Mind what he says, and do what he tells you, and you’ll get on splendidly!” his mother had said as he left home.

“Don’t be afraid of him, but speak up. He’ll like you the better for it,” John counselled. “I wouldn’t have married your mother if I’d been afraid of him.”

Trying to follow both counsels, Richard got on with his grandfather quite well.

— Four —

A Lost Shoe

All things belong to every man who yields his selfishness—which is his one impoverishment—and draws near to his wealth, which is humanity—not humanity in the abstract, but the humanity of friends and neighbours and all men. Selfishness, I repeat, whether in the form of vanity or greed, is our poverty.

John Tuke was a reasonably clever man who thought highly of his skill with his hands. His natural atmosphere was goodwill and kindliness, but he cherished the unconscious feeling that his abilities were of his own merit. He took the credit for what he was and what he could do. The idea had never arisen in his brain that he was in the world by no creative intent of his own. A man’s one claim on manhood is that he can call upon God—not the God of any theology, right or wrong, but the God out of whose heart he came and in whose heart he is.

This is his highest power—that which constitutes his original likeness to God. But had anyone tried to wake this idea in Tuke, he would have mocked the very sound of it. He found himself what he found himself, and was content with the find.

Therefore he asked himself no questions as to whence he came. He never reflected that he might not have made himself, or that there might be a power somewhere that had called him into being that had a word to say to him on the matter. An ordinarily well-behaved man with a vague narrow regard for morals, he thought highly of himself as exceptionally worthy. In relation to Richard he was especially pleased with himself.