his friend's confidence, and he will adore that same cunning
complexity called Chance, which gives him the hope that his friend
will never know. Let him forsake a decent craft that he may pursue
the gentilities of a profession to which nature never called him,
and his religion will infallibly be the worship of blessed Chance,
which he will believe in as the mighty creator of success. The evil
principle deprecated in that religion is the orderly sequence by
which the seed brings forth a crop after its kind.



CHAPTER X

Justice Malam was naturally regarded in Tarley and Raveloe as a man
of capacious mind, seeing that he could draw much wider conclusions
without evidence than could be expected of his neighbours who were
not on the Commission of the Peace. Such a man was not likely to
neglect the clue of the tinder-box, and an inquiry was set on foot
concerning a pedlar, name unknown, with curly black hair and a
foreign complexion, carrying a box of cutlery and jewellery, and
wearing large rings in his ears. But either because inquiry was too
slow-footed to overtake him, or because the description applied to
so many pedlars that inquiry did not know how to choose among them,
weeks passed away, and there was no other result concerning the
robbery than a gradual cessation of the excitement it had caused in
Raveloe. Dunstan Cass's absence was hardly a subject of remark: he
had once before had a quarrel with his father, and had gone off,
nobody knew whither, to return at the end of six weeks, take up his
old quarters unforbidden, and swagger as usual. His own family, who
equally expected this issue, with the sole difference that the