understood. Though some years after, in quite another place--namely,
Steyning, in Sussex--I came upon just such another, whose quarrel was
with the English climate, the rich and the poor, and the whole
constitution of God's earth. These are the advantages of travel, that
one meets so many men whom one would otherwise never meet, and that one
feeds as it were upon the complexity of mankind.

Thus in a village called Encamps, in the depths of Andorra, where no man
has ever killed another, I found a man with a blue face, who was a
fossil, the kind of man you would never find in the swelling life of
Western Europe. He was emancipated, he had studied in Perpignan, over
and beyond the great hills. He could not see why he should pay taxes to
support a priest. "The priests" he assured me, "say the most ridiculous
things. They narrate the most impossible fables. They affirm what cannot
possibly be true. All that they say is in opposition to science. If I am
ill, can a priest cure me? No. Can a priest tell me how to build, or how
to light my house? He is unable to do so. He is a useless and a lying
mouth, why should I feed him?"

I questioned this man very closely, and discovered that in his view the
world slowly changed from worse to better, and to accelerate this
process enlightenment alone was needed. "But what do these brutes," he
said, alluding to his fellow-countrymen, "know of enlightenment? They do
not even make roads, because the priests forbid them."

I could write at length upon this man. He was not a Sceptic as you may
imagine, nor had he adopted the Lucretian form of Epicureanism. Not a
bit of it. He was a hearty Atheist, with Positivist leanings. I further
found that he had married a woman older, wealthier, and if possible
uglier than himself. She kept the inn, and was very kind to him. His