“But we must do more.  I must do more.  And you must help me.  We must stand together.  Slander never creates; it shackles and kills.  We must be solid.  Midway off the Cardigan coast—­in beautiful Morfa—­there is a rock—­Birds’ Rock.  As a boy I used to climb to the top of it, and watch the waters swirling and tumbling about it, and around it and against it.  But I was unafraid.  For I knew that the rock was old when man was young, and that it had braved all the washings of the sea.”

The men congratulated Ben; and Ben came home and he stood at a mirror, and shaping his body put out his arms.

“How’s this for my maiden speech in the house?” he asked his wife.  Presently he paused.  “You’re a fine one to be an M.P.’s lady,” he said.  “You stout, underworked fool.”

Ben urged on his imaginings:  he advised his monarch, and to him for favors merchants brought their gold, and mothers their daughters.  Winter and spring moved, and then his mind brought his enemies to his door.

“As the root of a tree spreads in the bosom of the earth,” he said, “so my fame shall spread over the world”; and he built a fence about his house.

But his mind would not be stilled.  Every midnight his enemies were at the fence, and he could not sleep for the dreadful outcry; every midnight he arose from his bed and walked aside the fence, testing the strength of it with a hand and a shoulder and shooing away his enemies as one does a brood of chickens from a cornfield.

His fortieth summer ran out—­a season of short days and nights speeding on the heels of night.  Then peace fell upon him; and at dusk of a day he came into his room, and he saw one sitting in a chair.  He went up to the chair and knelt on a knee, and said:  “Your Majesty....”

III

THE TWO APOSTLES

God covered sun, moon, and stars, stilled the growing things of the earth and dried up the waters on the face of the earth, and stopped the roll of the world; and He fixed upon a measure of time in which to judge the peoples, this being the measure which was spoken of as the Day of Judgment.

In the meanseason He summoned Satan to the Judgment Hall, which is at the side of the river that breaks into four heads, and above which, its pulpits stretching beyond the sky, is the Palace of White Shirts, and below which, in deep darknesses, are the frightful regions of the Fiery Oven.  “Give an account of your rule in the face of those whom you provoked to mischief,” He said to Satan.  “My balance hitched to a beam will weigh the good and evil of my children, and if good is heavier than evil, I shall lighten your countenance and clothe you with the robes of angels.”

“Awake the dead” He bade the Trumpeter, and “Lift the lids off the burying-places” He bade the laborers.  In their generations were they called; “for,” said the Lord, “good and evil are customs of a period and when the period is passed and the next is come, good may be evil and evil may be good.”