Owen Davies tramped along the cliff with a light heart.  The wild lashing of the rain and the roaring of the wind did not disturb him in the least.  They were disagreeable, but he accepted them as he accepted existence and all its vanities, without remark or mental comment.  There is a class of mind of which this is the prevailing attitude.  Very early in their span of life, those endowed with such a mind come to the conclusion that the world is too much for them.  They cannot understand it, so they abandon the attempt, and, as a consequence, in their own torpid way they are among the happiest and most contented of men.  Problems, on which persons of keener intelligence and more aspiring soul fret and foam their lives away as rushing water round a rock, do not even break the placid surface of their days.  Such men slip past them.  They look out upon the stars and read of the mystery of the universe speeding on for ever through the limitless wastes of space, and are not astonished.  In their childhood they were taught that God made the sun and the stars to give light on the earth; that is enough for them.  And so it is with everything.  Poverty and suffering; war, pestilence, and the inequalities of fate; madness, life and death, and the spiritual wonders that hedge in our being, are things not to be inquired into but accepted.  So they accept them as they do their dinner or a tradesman’s circular.

In some cases this mental state has its root in deep and simple religious convictions, and in some it springs from a preponderance of healthful animal instincts over the higher but more troublesome spiritual parts.  The ox chewing the cud in the fresh meadow does not muse upon the past and future, and the gull blown like a foam-flake out against the sunset, does not know the splendour of the sky and sea.  Even the savage is not much troubled about the scheme of things.  In the beginning he was “torn out of the reeds,” and in the end he melts into the Unknown, and for the rest, there are beef and wives, and foes to conquer.  But then oxen and gulls are not, so far as we know, troubled with any spiritual parts at all, and in the noble savage such things are not cultivated.  They come with civilization.

But perhaps in the majority this condition, so necessary to the more placid forms of happiness, is born of a conjunction of physical and religious developments.  So it was, at least, with the rich and fortunate man whom we have seen trudging along the wind-swept cliff.  By nature and education he was of a strongly and simply religious mind, as he was in body powerful, placid, and healthy to an exasperating degree.  It may be said that it is easy to be religious and placid on ten thousand a year, but Owen Davies had not always enjoyed ten thousand a year and one of the most romantic and beautiful seats in Wales.  From the time he was seventeen, when his mother’s death left him an orphan, till he reached the age of thirty, some six years from the date of the opening of this history, he led about as hard a life as fate could find for any man.  Some people may have heard of sugar drogers, or sailing brigs, which trade between this country and the West Indies, carrying coal outwards and sugar home.