with a smile that he tried hard to make indulgent: “Of course, if you believe _that_!” But he very seldom had to argue on these matters, because people, looking at his face with its upright bone-formation, rather bushy eyebrows, and eyes with a good deal of light in them, felt that it would be simpler not. He seemed to them to know his own mind almost too well. Joined to this potent faculty of implanting in men a childlike trustfulness in what he told them was behind the door, he had a still more potent faculty of knowing exactly what was good for them in everyday life. The secret of this power was simple. He did not recognise the existence of what moderns and so-called “artists” dubbed “temperament.” All talk of that sort was bosh, and generally immoral bosh; for all moral purposes people really had but one temperament, and that was, of course, just like his own. And no one knew better than he what was good for it. He was perfectly willing to recognise the principle of individual treatment for individual cases; but it did not do, in practice, he was convinced, to vary. This instinctive wisdom made him invaluable in all those departments of life where discipline and the dispensation of an even justice were important. To adapt men to the moral law was--he thought--perhaps the first duty of a preceptor, especially in days when there was perceptible a distinct but regrettable tendency to try and adapt the moral law to the needs--as they were glibly called--of men. There was, perhaps, in him something of the pedagogue, and when he met a person who disagreed with him his eyes would shift a bit to the right and a bit to the left, then become firmly fixed upon that person from under brows rather drawn down; and his hand, large and strong, would move fingers, as if more and more tightly grasping a cane, birch, or other wholesome instrument. He loved his fellow-creatures so that he could not bear to see them going to destruction for want of a timely flogging to salvation. He was one of those who seldom felt the need for personal experience of a phase of life, or line of conduct, before giving judgment on it; indeed, he gravely distrusted personal experience. He had opposed, for instance all relief for the unhappily married long before he left the single state; and, when he did leave it, would not admit for a moment that his own happiness was at all responsible for the petrifaction of his view that no relief was necessary. Hard cases made bad law! But he did not require to base his opinion upon that. He said simply that he had been told there was to be no relief--it was enough.