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Sam's sluggish nature had been receiving so many jolts of late and he had been reducing his physical nourishment to so meagre a point of late that his nerves were much more sensitised these days than was usual with him. That is perhaps why he stared so fixedly on that bug on the wall.

“Every locality,” he thought, “has its own midges, its own gnats, its own beetles, its own lice, its own bugs. They may resemble the others of their tribe; but they must be affected—few will dispute this—by the particular climatic conditions which exist around them. This bug was a Glastonbury bug. Had it any message for him, a Glastonbury man? Can't you throw light on this?” he thought, addressing the bug on the wall. But the bug was so extreme an individualist that it regarded the gibberish which reached it from this man's brain as the same sort of telepathic nonsense that it was accustomed to hear when in her heart Mrs. Bagge cried out:—“How long, 0 Lordy, 0 Lordy, how long, how long?” and it proceeded upon its tortuous way with less curiosity—not to speak of sympathy—than even ex-Mayor Wol-Jop would have felt

Sam, however, while he exchanged a few words now with his friend Jimmy who continued to stand at the foot of his father's bed,—Mr. Bagge himself seemed to be awaiting events in gloomy taciturnity—wrestled stubbornly in the depths of his mind with this problem.

“A limit there must be,” thought Sam, “to the sympathy one soul can give to other souls—or all would perish. Absolute sympathy with suffering would mean death. If Christ had sympathised to the limit with the pain of the world it would have been hard for him to have lived until the day of his Crucifixion. But what does that mean? Does it mean drawing back from the hell we stare at? Does it mean that every soul has a right to forget if it can forget? Sympathy with pain kills happiness. There comes a point when to live at all we must forget!”

His conclusion left him with a feeling of unutterable weakness, cowardice, contemptibleness. Submerged in sickening humility he groaned aloud. He had taken the precaution before starting, in anticipation of the penury of his friend's domicile, to put in his pocket several thick slices of bread and treacle and these, wrapped up in paper, he now took out and handed to his hostess. It was then that the truth of Jimmy's words about his parents became most painfully apparent; for his mother, after swallowing two or three hasty bites of one of these sandwiches, presented the rest of them just as they were to the silent man in the bed, who when once they were in his hands neither spoke nor looked up until there was not one crumb left upon the sticky paper in which they had been wrapped.

He was not an ill-looking man either, Sam thought, as those sallow jaws masticated the food and his Adam's apple rose and fell as he swallowed it; but there was something repulsive to the mind—and even a vague sense of something tragic and ghastly— in the way the sunken black eyes of Mrs. Bagge followed every morsel as it disappeared.

“Town council do see us don't starve,” said the woman presently, “but they gives us no food, only money; and Mr. Bagge feels money be too precious to be throwed away on victuals: so he puts it where't be safe.”

Mr. Bagge's puffy white face—not an unhandsome face—rising out of his filthy open shirt, lit up complacently on hearing this and his expression struck Sam as being the meanest human expression he had ever seen.

“Too precious to be throwed away,” he repeated with unctuous satisfaction, “on wittles ... so us puts it where't be safe.”

Sam was still wondering at the back of his mind what could be done to a bedridden miser who was starving his wife, when Mrs. Bagge, who looked positively transparent from lack of nutrition, though she was a large-framed bony woman, lifted up her voice from where she sat on the stool by the fire, with her discoloured skirts hanging so loosely between her gaunt knees that it looked as though they had been thrown across the handles of a plough, and remarked to Jimmy:

“Did yer arst yer friend, the sweet lovely gen'l'man, whether he could bless this house with half of a silver shilling?”

The wheedling gipsy-like tone of her voice—which yet was not the voice of a real gipsy—grated unpleasantly upon Sam's ears. He felt inclined to cry out, “I'll give you a whole shilling if you'll turn it into food and let me see you eat it!” He mentally decided that he would come here on the following day with some pork-pies that he had seen in the window of a little shop in Manor House Lane and give one to each member of the Bagge family and insist upon their eating them before his face<

But the voice of the master of the house became audible now

Mr. Bagge was apparently addressing the smoke-darkened, greasy ceiling.

“When I over'ears folk mention shillinses I zays to meself— 'put 'un where 'un be safe. Too precious be they shillinses to be squandered on wittles!'”

Sam rose to his feet. “I've got no money on me,” he said; and then, after a pause, “Well, I'll say good-night now, and go down to the river for a bit, to get a breath of air. I always sleep better after a breath of air. Don't get up, Mrs. Bagge.”

Jimmy followed him wistfully with his eyes as he moved to the door. The imbecile's face had a certain blank handsomeness, like the puffy good looks of the man under the blanket, but his expression was submissive and docile, like his mother's. Sam was alarmed lest his own conscience, that merciless and authoritative voice that nowadays always stood by his side, would insist on his allowing Jimmy to accompany him. It was therefore with a certain relief—for which he blamed himself as soon as he was out of the house—that he heard Mrs. Bagge say:—

“Ye'll get some wood for I, Jim, won't 'ee, afore 'ee do go to Pilgrims' to arst for coppers? Jim be a good lad, Mister,” the woman called after Sam as he went out. “If it 'tweren't for Jim, Mr. Bagge and me would be separated from each other and put in thik Wells wukkus.”

“If you're not separated from Mr. Bagge,” thought Sam, “you'll certainly get into the Wells Road Cemetery.”

But standing in the doorway he threw back a warm and enthusiastic commendation of Jimmy.

“I knew he was a good son,” he said, “as soon as he began talking about you both. Well! I hope he'll have good luck toiiight at the Pilgrims'.”

“Not for to squander!” shouted the handsome, puffy-faced man from his bed, “but for being kept where't be safe!”

And as he went off Sam couldn't help giving vent to a wicked wish that nephew Codfin would discover this “safe” hiding-place!

It was nearly dark when having threaded his way past many scattered hovels and desolate out-houses he finally reached the bank of the Brue. He was in an excited frame of mind, to which his anger at the behaviour of the man in the bed contributed not a little.

As he stood staring at the dark flow of the water he could sec that Adam's apple moving up and down as Mr. Bagge swallowed. But Sam nodded his head like one making a resolution that must wait its fulfillment, and began following the bank of the river in a southerly direction. He was now about midway between the wooden Northload Bridge and the stone Pomparles Bridge and in the obscurity of the twilight he could see rising out of the mud the scaffolding of Philip Crow's unfinished iron bridge.

As has been hinted, for several weeks Sam had begun to notice with a puzzled wonder that certain unpromising and unlikely objects gave him, as he glanced casually at them, thrilling spasms of a quivering happiness. It was only as these sudden seizures or shocks of unaccountable ecstasy increased upon him that he came to give them any particular attention. He was not of an analytic turn of mind; nor was he in any sense what is called “psychic.” It might even be maintained that Sam's temperament was rather below than above the normal level of what the world has agreed to name “spiritual.” Mystical he certainly was not. There was more mysticism in John Crow's little finger—for all his sceptical perversity—than in Sam's whole body. But he would have been worse than unimaginative; he would have been “duller than the fat weed on Lethe's wharf” not to' have noted these recurrences of unaccountable transport in which his whole being seemed caught up and transfigured. What made this phenomenon harder to understand was the fact that the objects that served to evoke this ecstasy were so varied and in themselves so insignificant. Not one of them was important enough to afford any satisfactory clue to the nature of the meaning of these thrilling sensations. It was almost as if some mysterious centre of magnetic force had been actually moving for some while through the thick darkness of the chemical constitution of that Glastonbury mud and those Glastonbury stones towards Sam's sluggish receptivity; seeking in that receptivity a pre-ordained objective.

He came suddenly at this moment, as he stumbled along the river bank under the moonless and cloudy sky, upon yet another of these chance-sent mediums of unaccountable feeling. This was an aged post, with an iron ring attached to it, used formerly for the purpose of mooring the small barges that in old days brought corn up the Brue. The post was but an obscure landmark by the flow of that dark tide; but Sam knew its exact position and he knew every detail of the landscape from this particular spot. He couldn't really see the iron ring upon the post; but he knew so well that it was there that he saw it without seeing it. But for some reason the mere sight of this post filled him with the most releasing, liberating and exultant of all his recent transports. His mind was so occupied with the idea of pain that he quite consciously began opposing this thrilling sensation with the opacity of pain. It was as if he took up great spadefuls of pain and flung them into the pathway of the delicious current that flowed through him; and in proportion as the current increased, so he threw more spadefuls of pain in front of it. But it swept them away as it flowed on, drank them up, swallowed them all into itself! And yet it would not be true to say that they became identical with the rushing flood of this ecstatic feeling. They were not absorbed as a natural sustenance. They nourished this flood; but the flood existed independently of them and did not depend upon them for its origin or its issue.

Sam found himself on his knees by this old post, so thrilled was he by the transport that poured through him; and, in his exultation, he pressed his forehead against it and ran his fingers up and down its damp sides. And he did begin, quite desperately now, to solve the mystery of all these experiences. He began to realise that the soul of the inanimate, the indwelling breath of life in all these ancient lifeless tilings, whereof the town was so full, was really moving towards him.

The emotion he experienced now was a good deal stronger than what had been produced in him until tonight by stones, and gates, and paving slabs, and patches of moss, and fragments of old walls, and carved mouldings and dead tree stumps, and ploughed-up furrows, and wayside puddles and gutters; but it was the same kind of mood.

Something in the atomic nature of the inorganic substance of tnese things must have answered to an inarticulate craving of Sam's, unt*:l Matter itself, the old obstinate Protean mystery, moved and stirred to meet him. He could actually feel a magnetic power pouring forth into his fingers from this post against which he leaned.

Sam had been born in Glastonbury. Glastonbury sights and sounds and smells, the psychic eidola that radiate forth from the surface of ancient inanimate substances, had surrounded him from his birth. Having concentrated his sluggish, earthy nature so steadily and so long upon birds and beasts and fishes, he must have accumulated an enormous mass of casually imprinted memories concerning his contact with the inorganic surroundings of these living creatures. By day and by night he must have touched —going up and down the fields, lanes, hillsides, valleys, fen-lands, tow-paths, spinneys, rhynes—innumerable gates, weirs, walls, marsh tussocks, mole hills, pond rails, heaps of stones, fallen trees, moss-grown ruins, and all these touches and casual contacts must have established between his inmost being and the mystery of matter in these things, deep correspondencies which were ready to rush forth at any summons.

Where lay the difference between the curious feeling he got as his fingers ran up and down the surface of this old barge post and the other recent sensation of the same nature? The difference was that the feeling he had now associated itself suddenly and strangely with that little dead fish that his father had taken out of the aquarium! The secret of matter had suddenly assumed a de^nite shape; and this shape was of a living kind—no longer inanimate but electric with animation. “Ichthus, the World-Fish,”—where had he picked up this singular expression? Not from any book he could think of in his father's shelves; not from the Sermons of Mr. Simeon! That the mystery of matter which had of late shivered through him in so many accidental contacts, should resolve itself in its primal leap, in its slippery quiver, in its up-rising from the pools of silence, into the actual form of a fish would have been an insane fancy for anyone else, but for Sam, with his up-bringing and environment, it bore an organic naturalness. Did he actually see in his mind's eye, then, the red fins, the greenish markings, the black stripes, the silvery tail, of any real fish? No! it was more subtle than this^But he did feel as if the solid matter all round him had become porous, so that some essence of life could move swiftly through it. In the mute balancing of this finny life-essence, passing through the primeval watery element that existed in all things, lay the inexplicable clue.

As he knelt in the damp mud of the tow-path beside this post, while the darkness deepened over him and the river flowed beneath him, he was driven forward once more by the honesty of his soul to face the ultimate dilemma. He became vividly conscious of himself as one entity among all the rest, carried along upon the night journey of the voyaging planet, and he seemed able to catch upon the breathing wind, mingled with the gurglings and suckings of the water, the cries of pain which at that second, all over the world, were rising up. There must be a limit to pity or the life-stream would stop; all would grow stagnant, and “Ichthus, the World-Fish,” would float dead upon its back!