that there was a deeper cause for his gloom than the state of his health.

When he was gone I stood with the key of the church in my hand, and looked
about me. Nature at least was in glorious health--sunshine in her eyes,
light fantastic cloud-images passing through her brain, her breath coming
and going in soft breezes perfumed with the scents of meadows and wild
flowers, and her green robe shining in the motions of her gladness. I
turned to lock the church door, though in my heart I greatly disapproved of
locking the doors of churches, and only did so now because it was not my
church, and I had no business to force my opinions upon other customs. But
when I turned I received a kind of questioning shock. There was the fallen
world, as men call it, shining in glory and gladness, because God was
there; here was the way into the lost Paradise, yea, the door into an
infinitely higher Eden than that ever had or ever could have been,
iron-clamped and riveted, gloomy and low-browed like the entrance to a
sepulchre, and surrounded with the grim heads of grotesque monsters of the
deep. What did it mean? Here was contrast enough to require harmonising,
or if that might not be, then accounting for. Perhaps it was enough to say
that although God made both the kingdom of nature and the kingdom of grace,
yet the symbol of the latter was the work of man, and might not altogether
correspond to God's idea of the matter. I turned away thoughtful, and went
through the churchyard with my eye on the graves.

As I left the churchyard, still looking to the earth, the sound of voices
reached my ear. I looked up. There, down below me, at the foot of the high
bank on which I stood, lay a gorgeous shining thing upon the bosom of the
canal, full of men, and surrounded by men, women, and children, delighting
in its beauty. I had never seen such a thing before, but I knew at once,
as by instinct, which of course it could not have been, that it was the
life-boat. But in its gorgeous colours, red and white and green, it looked