relieve us; but when with all our searching we can see nothing, then
at last we sink. Such was John's case when I first came to know him.
He attracted me rather, and bit by bit he confided his story to me.
He found out that I might be trusted, and that I could sympathise,
and he told me what he had never told to anybody before. I was
curious to discover whether religion had done anything for him, and I
put the question to him in an indirect way. His answer was that
"some on 'em say there's a better world where everything will be put
right, but somehow it seemed too good to be true." That was his
reason for disbelief, and heaven had not the slightest effect on him.
He found out the room, and was one of our most constant friends.

Another friend was of a totally different type. His name was
Cardinal. He was a Yorkshireman, broad-shouldered, ruddy in the
face, short-necked, inclined apparently to apoplexy, and certainly to
passion. He was a commercial traveller in the cloth trade, and as he
had the southern counties for his district, London was his home when
he was not upon his journeys. His wife was a curious contrast to
him. She was dark-haired, pinched-up, thin-lipped, and always seemed
as if she suffered from some chronic pain or gnawing--not sufficient
to make her ill, but sufficient to make her miserable. They had no
children. Cardinal in early life had been a member of an orthodox
Dissenting congregation, but he had fallen away. He had nobody to
guide him, and the position into which he fell was peculiar. He
never busied himself about religion or philosophy; indeed he had had
no training which would have led him to take an interest in abstract
questions, but he read all kinds of romances and poetry without any
order and upon no system. He had no discriminating faculty, and
mixed up together the most heterogeneous mass of trumpery novels,
French translations, and the best English authors, provided only they