Several he rescued from the web and then out of pity for the spider brought it flies already dead; but finding that these were not to its taste he left the difficulty unsolved and went sadly on his way. Almost equal to his pitifulness was his dislike of work and his moral cowardice. Nothing could persuade him to do any work, and such a coward was he that if he failed at the first house where he offered his laces for sale he would not try again in that village or town. Yet he did not scruple to steal--even with a hint of physical violence--if he needed anything which chance presented to him in another man’s possession: but he stole only necessaries, having none of the acquisitiveness which is more common in their victims than in thieves. Few men use leisure as well as he; perhaps no man was ever idle with less harm to his fellows. The rich could have learned many lessons at his feet: they must always be shooting or driving furiously or meddling with politics or stopping footpaths; they cannot be kept out of harm, however rich. How well this man would have employed money: he would have given it away! By and by his pity for goaded cattle and his frequent gazings into their brown eyes as they stared at him by a stile still further reduced his necessities--he would touch no meat; so that his companion, finding him no longer of much use in spite of his possession of but one arm, left him and only crossed his path at increasing intervals of time. It was now that Jones remembered with horror a scene which had slumbered in his mind with the fear which it originally roused in youth. He and other boys were in the habit of peeping through a hole in the wall of a slaughter-house and watching the slaughter, the skinning and the cutting up, until their ears became familiar with the groans, the screams, the gurglings, the squelchings in the half-darkness of candle-light, the blood and white faces and the knife. But one day there was led into the slaughter-house a white heifer fresh from the May pasture, clean and bright from her gleaming rosy hoofs to the tips of the horns that swayed as she walked. Her breath made, as it were, a sacred space about her as the light of a human face will do. She stood quiet but uncertain and musingly in the dark, soaked, half-ruinous place, into which light only came in bars through a cobwebbed lattice and fell that day upon her white face, leaving in darkness the tall butcher and the imbecile assistant who held the rope by which the animal’s head was drawn down to the right level for a blow. The men were in no hurry and as the heifer was not restive they finished their talk about Home Rule. Then the idiot tried to put her into the right position, but for a time could not get her to see that her head must be drawn tight and somewhat askew against the oaken pillar. He only succeeded by patting her flanks and saying gently as if to a girl: “Come along, Daisy!” She lowed soft and bowed her head; the blow fell;