But I was longer gone than I thought I should be.

When I reached the carpenter’s house, I found, to my surprise, that he was still at work.  By the light of a single tallow candle placed beside him on the bench, he was ploughing away at a groove.  His pale face, of which the lines were unusually sharp, as I might have expected after what had occurred, was the sole object that reflected the light of the candle to my eyes as I entered the gloomy place.  He looked up, but without even greeting me, dropped his face again and went on with his work.

“What!” I said, cheerily,—­for I believed that, like Gideon’s pitcher, I held dark within me the light that would discomfit his Midianites, which consciousness may well make the pitcher cheery inside, even while the light as yet is all its own—­worthless, till it break out upon the world, and cease to illuminate only glazed pitcher-sides—­“What!” I said, “working so late?”

“Yes, sir.”

“It is not usual with you, I know.”

“It’s all a humbug!” he said fiercely, but coldly notwithstanding, as he stood erect from his work, and turned his white face full on me—­of which, however, the eyes drooped—­“It’s all a humbug; and I don’t mean to be humbugged any more.”

“Am I a humbug?” I returned, not quite taken by surprise.

“I don’t say that.  Don’t make a personal thing of it, sir.  You’re taken in, I believe, like the rest of us.  Tell me that a God governs the world!  What have I done, to be used like this?”

I thought with myself how I could retort for his young son:  “What has he done to be used like this?” But that was not my way, though it might work well enough in some hands.  Some men are called to be prophets.  I could only “stand and wait.”

“It would be wrong in me to pretend ignorance,” I said, “of what you mean.  I know all about it.”

“Do you?  He has been to you, has he?  But you don’t know all about it, sir.  The impudence of the young rascal!”

He paused for a moment.

“A man like me!” he resumed, becoming eloquent in his indignation, and, as I thought afterwards, entirely justifying what Wordsworth says about the language of the so-called uneducated,—­“A man like me, who was as proud of his honour as any aristocrat in the country —­prouder than any of them would grant me the right to be!”

“Too proud of it, I think—­not too careful of it,” I said.  But I was thankful he did not heed me, for the speech would only have irritated him.  He went on.

“Me to be treated like this!  One child a ...”

Here came a terrible break in his speech.  But he tried again.

“And the other a ...”

Instead of finishing the sentence, however, he drove his plough fiercely through the groove, splitting off some inches of the wall of it at the end.

“If any one has treated you so,” I said, “it must be the devil, not God.”