but rose in all their freshness, as by a subtle conspiracy, yet blind to the world about them, conscious only of the sunlight and the rain, with no imaginative knowledge, it would seem, or sympathy with their brethren. It always filled Hugh with a sort of pity to think of the sightless life of trees and flowers, each rising in its place, in plain, on hill, and yet each enclosed within itself, with no consciousness of its own beauty, and still less conscious of the beauty of its fellows. And what was the life that animated them? Where did it come from? Where did it pass to? Had they any sense of joy, of sorrow? It was hard to believe that they had not. It always distressed Hugh to see flowers gathered or boughs broken; it seemed a hateful tyranny to treat these delicate creatures so for an hour's pleasure. The sight of flowers picked and then thrown carelessly down by the roadside, gave him a sense of helpless indignation. The idyllic picture of children wandering in spring, filling their hands with flower-heads torn from bank and copse, appeared to Hugh as only painful. Man, from first to last, seemed to spread a ruthless destruction around him. Hugh's windows overlooked a stream-bend much frequented by fishermen; and it was a misery to him to see the poor dace, that had lived so cool and merry a life in the dark pools of the stream, poising and darting among the river-weed, hauled up struggling to the air, to be greeted with a shout of triumph, and passed about, dying and tortured, among the hot hands, in the thin, choking air. Was that what God made them for? What compensation awaited them for so horrible and shameful an end? Hugh felt with a sigh that the mystery was almost unendurable, that God should make, hour by hour, these curious and exquisite things, such as flowers and fishes, and thrust them, not into a world where they could live out a peaceful and innocent life, but into the midst of dangers and miseries. Sometimes, beneath his windows, he could see a shoal of little fish flick from the water in all directions at the rush of a pike, one of them no doubt horribly engulphed in the monster's jaws.