"Oh, ye never need to worry aboot yer custom; it's aye there. Noo in other lines the laws o' supply and demand are tricky. I mind a gey puckle years syne there was a craze for walkin'-sticks wi' ebony handles. Weel, I went doon to Dundee and bocht ten pund worth o' ebony, and afore the wood was delivered the fashion had changed, and the men were all buyin' cheese-cutter bonnets, so here was I left wi' ten pund worth o' ebony on my hands . . . and if I hadna sold it to Davie Lamb the cabinet-maker for thirteen pund I micht ha' lost the money. Noo, in my trade there's no sudden change o' fashion as ye micht say; the demand is what ye micht call constant, and that's what makes me say it is a safe trade." Dauvit winked to me surreptitiously. "Noo, joiner," he said, "will ye tell me wan thing? I want to ken the inner workin's o' an undertakker's mind. When somebody is verra ill, what's your attitude? I mean to say, do ye sort o' look on the illness wi' hope or what? When ye see a fine set-up man on the road, do ye look at him wi' a professional eye and say to yersell: 'Sax feet by twa; a bonny corp!'?" "I'm no so bad as that, Dauvit," he laughed, "though I dinna mind sayin' that I've sometimes been a wee bit disappointed when somebody got better. On the other hand, when big Tamson was badly, I keepit prayin' that he wud get better." "An unbusinesslike thing to do," I laughed. "Aweel," said the joiner, "big Tamson weighed aboot saxteen stone, and at the time I hadna the wood." "I dinna like to hear aboot things like that," said Jake Tosh nervously; "things like that give me the creeps, and besides it's no a proper way to speak." Dauvit turned to me. "Man, dominie, it's a queer thing, but the more religious a man is the less he likes to hear aboot death. Jake here is an elder o' the auld kirk; he's on the straight and narrow path; he's going straight to heaven when he dees . . . and I never saw onybody so feared o' death as Jake is. How wud ye explain that?" "I think," I replied, "that it is due to the fact that Jake has been brought up in the fear of the Lord." "Exactly," nodded Dauvit. "It's my belief that most religious fowk are religious not becos they want specially to play harps in the next world, but becos they dinna want to be roasted." Dauvit's philosophy comes pretty near that of Edmond Holmes. In _What Is and What Might Be_ Holmes argues that our education system is founded on the Old Testament. Man is a sinner, prone to evil; a stern angry God chastises him when he transgresses. Education treats children as sinners; it punishes the wrongdoer. I believe Holmes is right, only he does not trace back education far enough. The God of the Old Testament was a man-made God (Jung says that man makes his God in his own image; his God is his ego-ideal).