against the pricks.’ When this flag was up, the neighbourhood knew there would be an afternoon lecture next Sunday.
Our two gentlemen took a footpath to Dulham lying across some wide flat pastures, divided, not by hedgerows but by wet ditches of considerable depth, everyone of which was filled with a thick crop of tall marsh reeds, that rustled gently as they bowed to the breeze.
‘Nice grazing lands,’ observed the parson. ‘Very different from what I remember them some five-and-thirty years ago. None of these ditches cut, and half the place a swamp. Capital sport for the gun, plenty of snipe, ducks too, in hard frosts; but as for farm stock—bless you!’
‘Ah, and even now these rushes thrive well in their close quarters,’ said Mr Lockstable, the path leading them at the moment by a plank and rail across one of the largest cuttings. ‘They look, to my fancy, as if they liked their new place better than spreading wild about pools and moss.’
‘Curious now you should think of that!’ exclaimed Mr Smeeth, halting. ‘The very same idea struck Bristley when he and I passed this way not long ago, and it gave rise to one of his original speculative notions!’
‘What was that?’
‘He said that the case of the rushes in their ditches is an analogue of cosmic economy. Just as these rushes do better for being confined to a set place where they make no waste, so various excesses of human nature which, if allowed to run riot through society, are felt as intolerable, do, when grappled with and organised, become not only harmless but positively useful. Under this conception, the soul has been aptly called a garden, and thus perhaps a key may be supplied to the fable of the garden of Eden. Anyhow, under this view, the phenomenon of the existence
