"Let us have a rest here, Ethel," I said. "I am sure this is much more delightful than uprooting ferns. What an awful thing to think that here we are on this great round tumbling ball of a world, held by the feet, and lifting up the head into infinite space--without choice or wish of our own--compelled to think and to be, whether we will or not! Just God must know it to be very good, or he would not have taken it in his hands to make individual lives without a possible will of theirs. He must be our Father, or we are wretched creatures--the slaves of a fatal necessity! Did it ever strike you, Turner, that each one of us stands on the apex of the world? With a sphere, you know, it must be so. And thus is typified, as it seems to me, that each one of us must look up for himself to find God, and then look abroad to find his fellows." "I think I know what you mean," was all Turner's reply. "No doubt," I resumed, "the apprehension of this truth has, in otherwise ill-ordered minds, given rise to all sorts of fierce and grotesque fanaticism. But the minds which have thus conceived the truth, would have been immeasurably worse without it; nay, this truth affords at last the only possible door out of the miseries of their own chaos, whether inherited or the result of their own misconduct." "What's that in the grass?" cried Wynnie, in a tone of alarm. I looked where she indicated, and saw a slow-worm, or blind-worm, lying basking in the sun. I rose and went towards it. "Here's your stick," said Turner. "What for?" I asked. "Why should I kill it? It is perfectly harmless, and, to my mind, beautiful." I took it in my hands, and brought it to my wife. She gave an involuntary shudder as it came near her. "I assure you it is harmless," I said, "though it has a forked tongue." And I opened its mouth as I spoke. "I do not think the serpent form is essentially ugly." "It makes me feel ugly," said Wynnie. "I allow I do not quite understand the mystery of it," I said. "But you never saw lovelier ornamentation than these silvery scales, with all the neatness of what you ladies call a set pattern, and none of the stiffness, for there are not two of them the same in form. And you never saw lovelier curves than this little patient creature, which does not even try to get away from me, makes with the queer long thin body of him." "I wonder how it can look after its tail, it is so far off," said Wynnie.