Without being wrong-headed or a bigot, he could not readily see how there might be two tolerably fair views to any subject. If he thought he was right, he felt himself to be entirely right. He would give perfect liberty to another man to differ from him, but he could not allow there existed any likelihood the other man was right. He saw all questions in their totality, not in detail. If it was morally wrong to hang a man for murder, why not abolish hanging to-morrow morning? If it was not morally wrong, and if it was necessary for the protection of the community that murderers should be hung, why, then it must be fools who could have any aversion from the office of hangman. He had been brought up in a small, rigid home, and in a dull, monotonous way. He had bean a student of books, those immutable echoes of eternal voices. He had been a lover of Nature, which week after week moves onward to well-ascertained stations, producing anticipated results. He had rarely been from home, and never far. He knew absolutely nothing of the world until mighty London surged round him. Even then he could not realise the magnitude of the great riddle of man being worked at and abandoned daily by the millions living round him. It was like giving a man sight for the first time in the middle of the Atlantic, and expecting him to be able to draw outlines of the American and European coasts. In the little town the ordinary affairs of man, the births, deaths, and marriages, went on in regular routine. No foreign armies camped in the tree-sheltered fields. To him the news of wars and battles sounded old-world and obsolete. There had been no sounds of fight here for many score years. No great famine visited the place, no great pestilence. Folk died in their beds, and had decent funerals. Neither great poverty nor great riches distinguished the inhabitants. As a rule, they went soberly through their lives, and usually left a little money behind them. There were no fleets arriving from wonderful climes. All the produce of the East was denationalised by the grocer or the druggist or the jeweller. For these people there was no place farther off than London, whence all exotic produce found its way to the town.