is the absence of sin.  I have some sense myself of the sacred duty of surprise; and the need of seeing the old road as a new road.  But I cannot claim that whenever I go out for a walk with my family and friends, I rush in front of them volleying vociferous shouts of happiness; or even leap up round them attempting to lick their faces.  It is in this power of beginning again with energy upon familiar and homely things that the dog is really the eternal type of the Western civilisation.  And the donkey is really as different as is the Eastern civilisation.  His very anarchy is a sort of secrecy; his very revolt is a secret.  He does not leap up because he wishes to share my walk, but to follow his own way, as lonely as the wild ass of Scripture.  My own beast of burden supports the authority of Scripture by being a very wild ass.  I have given him the name of Trotsky, because he seldom trots, but either scampers or stands still.  He scampers all over the field when it is necessary to catch him, and stands still when it is really urgent to drive him.  He also breaks fences, eats vegetables, and fulfills other functions; between delays and destructions he could ruin a really poor man in a day.  I wish this fact were more often remembered, in judging whether really poor men have really been cruel to donkeys.  But I assure the reader that I am not cruel to my donkey; the cruelty is all the other way.  He kicks the people who try to catch him; and again I am haunted by a dim human parallel.  For it seems to me that many of us, in just detestation of the dirty trick of cruelty to animals, have really a great deal of patience with animals; more patience, I fear, than many of us have with human beings.  Suppose I had to go out and catch my secretary in a field every morning; and suppose my secretary always kicked me by way of beginning the day’s work; I wonder whether that day’s work would resume its normal course as if nothing had happened.  Nothing graver than these grotesque images and groping speculations would come into my conscious mind just then, though at the back of it there was an indescribable sense of regret and parting.  All through my wanderings the dog remained in my memory as a Dickensian and domestic emblem of England; and if it is difficult to take a donkey seriously, it ought to be easiest, at least, for a man who is going to Jerusalem.

There was a cloud of Christmas weather on the great grey beech-woods and the silver cross of the cross-roads.  For the four roads that meet in the market-place of my little town make one of the largest and simplest of such outlines on the map of England; and the shape as it shines on that wooded chart always affects me in a singular fashion.  The sight of the cross-roads is in a true sense the sign of the cross.  For it is the sign of a truly Christian thing; that sharp combination of liberty and limitation which we call choice.  A man is entirely free to choose between right and left, or between right and wrong.  As I looked for the last time at the pale roads under the load of cloud, I knew that our civilisation had indeed come to the cross-roads.  As the paths grew fainter, fading under the gathering shadow, I felt rather as if it had lost its way in a forest.