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He heaved up from the creaking little bed, his body alert and at attention. His arbitrary soul, standing over his body, told it that it had been enjoying itself long enough at that pleasant window.

“You know perfectly well what youVe got to do this morning, Monsieur!” his soul said to his body. “You've got to go over to Backwear Hut and give old Twig his enema.”

His body agreed at once to obey this mandate but it craftily intimated that since it was already so late it would be better to start at once upon this excursion rather than make the bed and tidy the room and wash up the breakfast things. But Sam Dekker, although a very youthful “holy man” had not been a priest's assistant so long without knowing something about the cunning devices of what St. Francis calls “my brother the ass.”

Chuckling to himself at his desire to escape doing his housework, he was soon re-lighting his methylated lamp and running downstairs to refill his jug at the pump in the yard. Even with this delay he was so fast a walker that he reached Backwear Hut not long after Number One had put his pot of onions, potatoes and chicken bones upon his kitchen-stove.

Poor old Ahel had been suffering of late from two most vexing physical maladies, either of which would have rendered him miserable, but which together broke down his spirit. One was his villainous constipation, and the other a still worse attack of piles. With the utmost difficulty, under the encouragement of his faithful crony Number Two, the old man had been persuaded to go to the hospital clinic; but the slap-dash methods of the internes, and an interview, in an ether-smelling corridor, with the competent Aunt Laura, had sent him home trembling with nervous indignation, and resolute to confine himself henceforward to his own private remedies—Beecham's Pills for the first trouble and copious vaseline for the second.

When he reached Backwear Hut, Old Twig (“and small blame for him,” thought Sam) was all for putting off the enema for a •few minutes. There, however, it was—the kind where you have to pinch an India-rubber ball in order to squirt the water—reposing, unused, in its cardboard box, just as Number One had bought it at the establishment of Harry Stickles.

Mr. Twig, with the proper delicacy of an elderly gentleman buying medical aid, had peeped through the window of the little chemist's shop, till he made sure that the beautiful Nancy was safe upstairs; and it may be taken for granted that the avaricious husband of Nancy made him pay heavily for this engaging shyness! But at this moment the good old man, with the enema lying safe in its box on the table, cajoled his visitor into sitting down for a few minutes in his front room. It was mild enough to have the door open; and as Sam stretched out his Penny-patched knickerbockers and his Penny-darned stockings by the side of the old man's Sunday trousers, and listened to his talk as the fowls clucked and scratched on the threshold, a delicious sensation of calm flowed through him.

Motor cars were few at that hour upon the Godney Road; and from the distant town there came uninterrupted a murmur, a rumour of drowsy life, of a life that was not the life of man or of beast, but of Glastonbury herself, murmuring softly in her long historic trance of the past, of the present and of the future.

Sam thought to himself: “This Christ that is hidden in matter and contradicts all cruelty, can He possibly come from Nature?”

“What I'd-ur-zay consarnin' this here commoon,'5 Mr. Twig was now observing, ”is that it be a play-acting of the eddicated. For such as understands them things, 'tis no doubt a very good commoon. But I baint a book-larned man. Conservative be a plain word to I and so be Liberal, in a manner of speaking, though not so plain; but I reckon a man must be pretty far along wi' his book-larnin' afore he gets the hang of a commoon."

“Well, Mr. Twig,” said Sam sententiously, “my father's got a lot of books in his study; but I remember quite well when the first number of the Wayfarer came out and there was a long article about Communism in it by Mr. Athling, he said very much what you're saying now.”

“Me wold pard, Bart Jones, do zay,” went on Mr. Twig, "that it be they noises what he heered in orspital, they rumblings and blearings from they ruings, what have brought such things to pass. But if 'ee 'arst me, Mister, what have called down these wonders to earth, Fd-ud-zay 'tis thik young man from they SiiK Isles/'

“How are your nieces at Miss Drew's?” enquired Sam.

The old man leaned forward, his hands on his knees and his finger on his lips.

“Lily did tell I, last time they was here, that Louie be keepin* company with young Tankerville, what be Air. Crow”s new pilot. Lily says it be tender-'eartedness in dear Louie, seein“ Air. Tankerville be a lone man with a wife in cemetery.”

Sam was not enough of a psychologist to catch the full flavour of this “wife in cemetery,” in relation to Lily's interest in her sister's good fortune, although there did rise up on the utmost verge of his consciousness like a beautiful apparition at a seance, the pure cold melancholy of the parlour-maid's face.

“And what about Lily herself? Hasn't she got a young man yet?”

Number One gave him the queerest look of mischievous gravity, a look that seemed to say: “Lily of course is our Lily—but if any outsider considered her wilfulnesses from the point of view of real common sense, he would be flabbergasted.”

“Lily hasn't no young man,” Abey Twig replied. “Louie thinks she've aspired, in her tender 'eart, higher than the state of life to which it has pleased God to call her. Louie thinks she be anglin' for Mr. Barter.”

The old man leaned back in his chair and surveyed Sam with quizzical gravity.

“What they gals can say of one another to a wold relative passes comprehension.”

“What do you say to them, Mr. Twig?”

“I listens. I chucks 'em under chin. I tells 'em how pretty thei? ribbings be. I waggles my head.”

Sam could hear the great pot boiling on the kitchen stove and the kettle lid rising and falling beside it.

“Well, Mr. Twig,” he said, “we'd better be getting to business. If I thought that you could hold yourself in, between your bedroom and the end of your garden, I'd say—but I don't believe you could! Which being so, I fancy it would be wiser to use your chamber-pot.”

Poor Uncle Abel was on his feet now, his knees knocking together, his face pale.

“When . . . operation ... be over,” he stammered, “do 'ee mean that 'ee be going to leave I, alone with me burstin' backside?”

Sam hesitated. In his anticipations of this scene he had visualised every detail of the giving of the enema; but once given, he had imagined himself saying good-bye. To learn that he had to wait upon the old man's subsequent discomfort—a process which might easily take half an hour—was a shock of some magnitude. But his soul, like a stern corporal, rose up tall and metallic and commanded his body to obey orders.

“All right,” he said aloud. “Don't you be afraid, Mr. Twig. I'll see you through to the bitter end.”

Having uttered these words Sam picked up the cardboard box from the table and surveyed its contents.

“I shall want some hot water and some soap,” he said.

The melting of the soap, the conveyance of the hot and cold water upstairs, took a few more minutes; but the wheels of time, as with people condemned to die, moved remorselessly on, and the moment arrived when Sam was following the old man upstairs to get the thing done.

As he went up behind Abel Twig he thought to himself, “It would be a much easier thing if it wasn't for the piles.” These piles, as he entered the bedroom and glanced at all his careful preparations, presented themselves to his mind as a shocking obstacle.

“Those people would probably hurt you much less in the hospital,” his body weakly murmured.

Poor old Abel with his teeth chattering and his braces and shirt hanging loose, turned upon his man-nurse eyes of such wild terror, eyes so much like that of a bullock before a slaughterer, that Sam hurriedly apologised for mentioning the word hospital. But his cowardly body was still trying to escape. There was a double-edged treachery in the words he uttered now.

“It's how you take the whole thing,” he said, "that makes the difference. Well, I don't know what to think, Mr. Twig. It can't be good to feel—perhaps it might, after all. be better to get the doc------''

But at the merest suggestion of that unlucky word. Mr. TVig looked as if he would willingly let Sam cut off his lea.

“Go ahead, Sir,” he said. “If I hollers you must be patient wi' I. I be a dodderin' old man, nigh four-score years old. I baint as strong as I were once and they pains do make I call out. They bloody piles be a worse tribulation than any girt zistv. . . . Oh, me humpty, me humpty! But I be fearful bad. Be ”e° tender of I, Mister; be 'ee tender of I! A man's backside be a turble squeamy pleace."

Sam was not, it must be confessed, a born nurse; but he was a born naturalist and an unfastidious countryman. As he struggled with his task, bending over the old gentleman's rear, the tension of his spirit brought back with a rush the miraculous power of the vision he had seen. The two extremes of his experience, the anus of an aged man and the wavering shaft of an Absolute, piercing his own earthly body, mingled and fused together in his consciousness. Holy Sam felt, as he went on with the business, a strange second sight, an inkling, as to some incredible secret, whereby the whole massed weight of the world's tormented flesh was labouring towards some release.

As he kept pinching that rubber tube, for which Number One had been so scurvily cheated by the unworthy Mr. Stickles, there came over him a singular clairvoyance about the whole nature of the world. In the silence around him, unbroken save when the old man cried out his queer expletive: “Me humpty! Me humpty!” he seemed conscious of their two figures, cowering there beneath eternity, towards whom he felt directed, in magnetic waves, the influence of the sun, and the influence of the great mysterious ether beyond the sun! He felt as if they were surrounded, there in Backwear Hut, by hosts upon hosts of conscious personalities, some greater, some less, than themselves. A sharp pang took him when—in this extremity of clairvoyance—he realised that his living tortured Christ was now changed to something else. But whatever Sam's priggishness may have been, it was mercilessly honest, and he said to himself: “If Christ be dead, I still have seen the Grail.”

The anguish he was compelled to give the old man because of the piles, made the process a delicate and difficult one. Beads of perspiration stood out on Sam's forehead before it was over. When it was over—and, as he had foreseen, it took more than half an hour—poor Number One was completely prostrate. Pallid and groaning, when at last Sam helped him up from his seat of purgation, he lay helplessly on his bed. It was all Sam could do to persuade him to get under the bed-clothes.

“Four-score years old I be, four-score years, come Whitsun,” he groaned, “and I be a wambly carcass; not fit for a gentleman to op'rate on. I be a burden to king and country, turble weak in me stummick and turble sore in me backside.”

Through the open window, there came now a shrill chattering of sparrows.

“Them birds be different nor us be,” murmured Abel Twig. “Them birds can scatter, even as them do fly, and all be sweet as clover.”

In his weakness and helplessness and in the physical relief he was then experiencing two or three big tears rolled down his cheeks. In some mysterious way the idea of the droppings of sparrows being so clean a thing filled Number One just then with a melting tenderness.

“I'll carry this away,” said Sam, “and then I'll bring you up a glass of something hot. I suppose you're not quite equal to your pipe yet?”

“Oh, you prig! Oh, you asinine prig!” Nell's husband would have roared at this point. “Equal to it? No, not quite equal to it yet! Not quite equal! But presently perhaps------”

“I be all right without 'un for a bit, Mister,” replied the old man. “I be . . . thinking ... of me chicks and me wold cow; and how glad I'll be to see all they again, after me operation.”

Sam said no more, but taking up the chamber-pot he opened the door and carried it downstairs. Stepping gingerly along the stone slabs across the little garden he emptied the thing in the privy, and carrying it back to the house rinsed it out at Number One's out-door tap. Then he went into the kitchen and surveyed the polished sauce-pan wherein the old man had prepared his Sunday stew.

It appeared to him that the contents of this capacious receptacle, judging by the steam which emerged from under its lid. was cooked enough to provide at least a fairly sa\ou:v soup: sr. he took it off the fire, and finding a strainer amont: t'ncle Abel's utensils he filled a small bowl with the onion-smelling liquid and carried it upstairs.

He found Number One nearly asleep, and instead of heinz pleased at the sight of this refreshment the old gentleman seemed vexed with him for meddling with his culinary arrangements. • “Do you want me to pour this back again, then?” said Sam.

Abel Twig nodded faintly and closed his eyes.

“Me pipe and me baccy be best for I,” he murmured.

Sam once more assumed the tone that Zoyland would have howled with contempt to hear.

“A man likes his own tobacco,” he said, “or I'd offer you a pipe of my father's. This is what he smokes.”

And he displayed before the eyes of the somnolent invalid a tobacco-pouch which he had been keeping in his pocket since he left the Vicarage.

“I be minded to have a wink o' sleep,” was Abel Twig's sole comment upon this proceeding.

To Sam's astonishment, when having descended the stairs and having poured back the half-cooked stew into the sauce-pan he returned to the front room of the house, he found himself confronted by a little girl in the doorway, panting and sobbing. Floods of tears were streaming down her cheeks and her voice was hardly audible. Sam knew who she was, though he had had little to do with her.

“What is the matter . . . Nelly? You are Nelly, aren't you?”1

It gave him a very odd feeling to say the word Nelly at this hour and in this place.

“I . . . knows . . . who you ... be!” gasped the child, sLruggling for breath and wiping her wet cheeks with the back of her hand, “You be Holy Sam!”