“To answer that question must be my modest attempt,” he decided. “In fine—why is a Kennaston? The query has a humorous ring undoubtedly, in so far as it is no little suggestive of the spinning mouse that is the higher the fewer—but, after all, it voices the sole question in which I personally am interested....” * * * * * “Why is a Kennaston?” he asked himself—thus whimsically voicing the inquiry as to whether human beings were intended for any especial purpose. Most of us find it more comfortable, upon the whole, to stave off such queries—with a jest, a shrug, or a Scriptural quotation, as best suits personal taste; but Kennaston was “queer” enough to face the situation quite gravely. Here was he, the individual, very possibly placed on—at all events, infesting—a particular planet for a considerable number of years; the planet was so elaborately constructed, so richly clothed with trees and valleys and uplands and running waters and multitudinary grass-blades, and the body that housed Felix Kennaston was so intricately wrought with tiny bones and veins and sinews, with sockets and valves and levers, and little hairs which grew upon the body like grass-blades about the earth, that it seemed unreasonable to suppose this much cunning mechanism had been set agoing aimlessly: and so, he often wondered if he was not perhaps expected to devote these years of human living to some intelligible purpose? Religion, of course, assured him that the answer to his query was written explicitly, in various books, in very dissimilar forms. But Kennaston could find little to attract him in any theory of the universe based upon direct revelations from heaven. Conceding that divinity had actually stated so-and-so, from Sinai or Delphi or Mecca, and had been reported without miscomprehension or error, there was no particular reason for presuming that divinity had spoken veraciously: and, indeed, all available analogues went to show that nothing in nature dealt with its inferiors candidly. To liken the relationship to the intercourse of a father with his children, as did all revealed religions with queer uniformity, was at best a two-edged simile, in that it suggested a possible amiability of intention combined with inevitable duplicity. The range of an earthly father’s habitual deceptions, embracing the source of life and Christmas presents on one side and his own fallibility on the other, was wide enough to make the comparison suspicious. When fathers were at their worst they punished; and when in their kindliest and most expansive moods, why, then it was—precisely—that they told their children fairy-stories. It seemed to Kennaston, for a while, that all religions ended in this blind-alley.