“Don’t you see, Mr. Carpendike,” said fat Mr. Oggler, “it’s the happiness of the people we want; that’s what Captain Beauchamp works for—their happiness; that’s the aim of life for all of us. Look at me! I’m as happy as the day. I pray every night, and I go to church every Sunday, and I never know what it is to be unhappy. The Lord has blessed me with a good digestion, healthy pious children, and a prosperous shop that’s a competency—a modest one, but I make it satisfy me, because I know it’s the Lord’s gift. Well, now, and I hate Sabbath-breakers; I would punish them; and I’m against the public-houses on a Sunday; but aboard my little yacht, say on a Sunday morning in the Channel, I don’t forget I owe it to the Lord that he has been good enough to put me in the way of keeping a yacht; no; I read prayers to my crew, and a chapter in the Bible—Genesis, Deuteronomy, Kings, Acts, Paul, just as it comes. All’s good that’s there. Then we’re free for the day! man, boy, and me; we cook our victuals, and we _must_ look to the yacht, do you see. But we’ve made our peace with the Almighty. We know that. He don’t mind the working of the vessel so long as we’ve remembered him. He put us in that situation, exactly there, latitude and longitude, do you see, and work the vessel we must. And a glass of grog and a pipe after dinner, can’t be any offence. And I tell you, honestly and sincerely, I’m sure my conscience is good, and I really and truly don’t know what it is _not_ to know happiness.” “Then you don’t know God,” said Carpendike, like a voice from a cave. “Or nature: or the state of the world,” said Beauchamp, singularly impressed to find himself between two men, of whom—each perforce of his tenuity and the evident leaning of his appetites—one was for the barren black view of existence, the other for the fantastically bright. As to the men personally, he chose Carpendike, for all his obstinacy and sourness. Oggler’s genial piety made him shrink with nausea. But Lord Palmet paid Mr. Oggler a memorable compliment, by assuring him that he was altogether of his way of thinking about happiness. The frank young nobleman did not withhold a reference to the two or three things essential to his happiness; otherwise Mr. Oggler might have been pleased and flattered. Before quitting the shop, Beauchamp warned Carpendike that he should come again. “Vote or no vote, you’re worth the trial. Texts as many as you like. I’ll make your faith active, if it’s alive at all. You speak of the Lord loving his own; you make out the Lord to be _your_ own, and use your religion like a drug. So it appears to me. That Sunday tyranny of yours has to be defended. Remember that; for I for one shall combat it and expose it. Good day.” Beauchamp continued, in the street: “Tyrannies like this fellow’s have made the English the dullest and wretchedest people in Europe.” Palmet animadverted on Carpendike: “The dog looks like a deadly fungus that has poisoned the woman.”