to inherit the land, but whose descendants were preserved to see it
delivered to the alien. The God of Cotton Mather and Jonathan Edwards had
been tried in the balance and found wanting. Edward could never
understand this; or why the Universe, so long static and immutable, had
suddenly begun to move. He had always been prudent, but in spite of
youthful "advantages," of an education, so called, from a sectarian
college on a hill, he had never been taught that, while prudence may
prosper in a static world, it is a futile virtue in a dynamic one.
Experience even had been powerless to impress this upon him. For more
than twenty years after leaving college he had clung to a clerkship in a
Dolton mercantile establishment before he felt justified in marrying
Hannah, the daughter of Elmer Wench, when the mercantile establishment
amalgamated with a rival--and Edward's services were no longer required.
During the succession of precarious places with decreasing salaries he
had subsequently held a terrified sense of economic pressure had
gradually crept over him, presently growing strong enough, after two
girls had arrived, to compel the abridgment of the family ....It would be
painful to record in detail the cracking-off process, the slipping into
shale, the rolling, the ending up in Hampton, where Edward had now for
some dozen years been keeper of one of the gates in the frowning brick
wall bordering the canal,--a position obtained for him by a compassionate
but not too prudent childhood friend who had risen in life and knew the
agent of the Chippering Mill, Mr. Claude Ditmar. Thus had virtue failed
to hold its own.

One might have thought in all these years he had sat within the gates
staring at the brick row of the company's boarding houses on the opposite
bank of the canal that reflection might have brought a certain degree of
enlightenment. It was not so. The fog of Edward's bewilderment never
cleared, and the unformed question was ever clamouring for an answer--how