Never was Briton more thankful to salute his native land, or feel the solid earth of it under his weary and very shaky feet.  He, an epicure, ate such coarse food, washed down by such coarse ale, as Tandy’s could offer with smiling relish.  Later, mounted on a forest pony—­an ill-favoured animal with a wall-eye, pink muzzle, bristly upper and hanging lower lip, more accustomed to carry a keg of smuggled spirits strapped beneath its belly than a cosmopolitan savant and social reformer on its back—­he rode the three miles to Marychurch, proposing there to take the coach to Southampton and, after a measure of rest and refitting, a post-chaise to Canton Magna, his elder brother’s fine place lying in a fold of the chalk hills which face the Sussex border.

The pony moved slowly and sullenly; but its rider felt no impatience.  His humour was of the kindliest.  His heart, indeed, came near singing for joy, simply, spontaneously, even as the larks sang, climbing up and upward from salt marsh and meadow, on either side the rutted road, into the limpid purity of the spring sky.  A light wind flapped the travel-stained, high-collared blue cloth cloak which he wore; and brought him both the haunting fetid-sweet reek of the mud flats—­the tide being low—­and the invigorating tang of the forest and moorland, uprolling there ahead, in purple and umber to the pale northern horizon.  Against that sombre background, fair and stately in the tender sunlight as a church of vision or dream, Marychurch Abbey rose above the roofs and chimneys of the little town.

During the latter half of the eighteenth century, not only were religious systems very much at a discount among persons of intelligence, but the Deity himself was relegated to the position of an exploded idea, becoming an object of vituperation, witty or obscene according to the humour of the individual critic.  As one of the illuminated, Mr. Verity did not escape the prevailing infection, although an inborn amenity of disposition saved him from atheism in its more blatantly offensive forms.  The existence of the Supreme Being might be, (probably was) so he feared, but “a fond thing vainly imagined”.  Yet such is the constitution of the human mind that age confers a certain prestige and authority even upon phantoms and suspected frauds.  Hence it followed that Mr. Verity, in the plenitude of his courtesy, had continued to take off his hat—­secretly and subjectively at all events—­to this venerable theological delusion, so dear through unnumbered centuries to the aching heart and troubled conscience of humanity.

But in the present glad hour of restored security—­his head no longer in danger of plopping, hideously bodiless, into la veuve’s basket, his inner-man, moreover, so recently and rackingly evacuated by that abominable Channel passage, now comfortably relined with Tandy’s meat and drink—­he went further in the way of acknowledgment.  A glow of very vital gratitude swept over him, so that looking at the majestic church—­secular witness to the soul’s faith in and need of Almighty God’s protective mercy and goodness—­he took off his hat, no longer metaphorically but actually, and bowed himself together over the pommel of the saddle with an irresistible movement of thanksgiving and of praise.