"It is the hardest thing in the world to do good with money!" he mused, sorrowfully. "Of course if I were to say this to the unthinking majority, they would gape upon me and exclaim--'Hard to do good! Why, there's nothing so easy! There are thousands of poor,--there are the hospitals--the churches!' True,--but the thousands of _real_ poor are not so easily found! There are thousands, ay, millions of 'sham' poor. But the _real_ poor, who never ask for anything,--who would not know how to write a begging letter, and who would shrink from writing it even if they did know--who starve patiently, suffer uncomplainingly, and die resignedly--these are as difficult to meet with as diamonds in a coal mine. As for hospitals, do I not know how many of them pander to the barbarous inhumanity of vivisection!--and have I not experienced to the utmost dregs of bitterness, the melting of cash through the hands of secretaries and under-secretaries, and general Committee-ism, and Red Tape-ism, while every hundred thousand pounds bestowed on these necessary institutions turns out in the end to be a mere drop in the sea of incessant demand, though the donors may possibly purchase a knighthood, a baronetcy, or even a peerage, in return for their gifts! And the churches!--my God!--as Madame Roland said of Liberty, what crimes are committed in Thy Name!" He looked up at the sky through the square opening of the shed, and saw the moon, now changed in appearance and surrounded by a curious luminous halo like the nimbus with which painters encircle the head of a saint. It was a delicate aureole of prismatic radiance, and seemed to have swept suddenly round the silver planet in companionship with a light mist from the sea,--a mist which was now creeping slowly upwards and covering the land with a glistening wetness as of dew. A few fleecy clouds, pale grey and white, were floating aloft in the western half of the heavens, evoked by some magic touch of the wind. "It will soon be morning,"--thought Helmsley--"The sun will rise in its same old glorious way--with as measured and monotonous a circuit as it has made from the beginning. The Garden of Eden, the Deluge, the building of the Pyramids, the rise and fall of Rome, the conquests of Alexander, the death of Socrates, the murder of Caesar, the crucifixion of Christ,--the sun has shone on all these things of beauty, triumph or horror with the same even radiance, always the generator of life and fruitfulness, itself indifferent as to what becomes of the atoms germinated under its prolific heat and vitality. The sun takes no heed whether a man dies or lives--neither does God!"