Yestergold believed that it lay in the past.  In his esteem the former times were better than the present.  People were simpler then, and truer to each other and happier.  There was more honesty in trade, more love in society, more religion in life.  Many an afternoon he went alone into the old abbey, where the tombs of saintly ladies, of holy men, and of brave fighters lay, and as he wandered up and down looking at their marble images, the gates of the Golden Age seemed to open up before him.  There was one figure, especially, before which he often stood.  It was the figure of a Crusader, his sword by his side, his hands folded across his breast, and his feet resting on a lion.  “Ay,” he would say, “in that Age the souls of brave men really trod the lion and the dragon under foot.”  But when the light of the setting sun came streaming through the great window in the west, and kindling up the picture of Christ healing the sick, his soul would leap up for joy, a new light would come into his eyes, and this thought would rise within him like a song—­“The Golden Age itself—­the Age into which all other Ages open and look back—­is pictured there.”

But on such occasions, as he came out of the abbey and went along the streets, if he met the people hastening soiled and weary from their daily toils, the joy would go out of his heart.  He would begin to think of the poor lives they were leading.  And he would cry within himself, “Oh that the lot of these toiling crowds had fallen on that happy Age!  It would have been easy then to be good.  Goodness was in the very air blessed by His presence.  The people had but to see Him to be glad.”  And sometimes his sorrow would be for himself.  Sometimes, remembering his own struggles to be good, and the difficulties in his way, and how far he was from being as good as he ought to be, he would say, “Would that I myself had been living when Jesus was on the earth.”  More or less this wish was always in his heart.  It had been in his heart from his earliest years.  Indeed, it is just a speech of his, made when he was a little boy, which has been turned into the hymn we so often sing:—­

  “I think when I read that sweet story of old,
    When Jesus was here among men,
  How He called little children, as lambs, to His fold,
    I should like to have been with Him then.

  “I wish that His hands had been placed on my head,
    That His arms had been thrown around me,
  That I might have seen His kind looks when He said,
    ‘Let the little ones come unto Me.’”

Goldmorrow’s thoughts were different.  They went forward into the future.  He had hardly any of Yestergold’s difficulties about being good.  He did not think much about his own state.  What took up all his thoughts was the state of the world in which his brothers and he were living.  How was that to be made better?  As he went up and down in his father’s kingdom, he beheld