“Ah! your work is not always a pleasant one,” I said, associating the feelings of which I have already spoken with the facts before me, and looking at the coffin, the lower part of which stood nearly finished upon trestles on the floor.

“Well, there are unpleasant things in all trades,” he answered.  “But it does not matter,” he added, with an increase of bitterness in his smile.

“I didn’t mean,” I said, “that the work was unpleasant—­only sad.  It must always be painful to make a coffin.”

“A joiner gets used to it, sir, as you do to the funeral service.  But, for my part, I don’t see why it should be considered so unhappy for a man to be buried.  This isn’t such a good job, after all, this world, sir, you must allow.”

“Neither is that coffin,” said I, as if by a sudden inspiration.

The man seemed taken aback, as Old Rogers might have said.  He looked at the coffin and then looked at me.

“Well, sir,” he said, after a short pause, which no doubt seemed longer both to him and to me than it would have seemed to any third person, “I don’t see anything amiss with the coffin.  I don’t say it’ll last till doomsday, as the gravedigger says to Hamlet, because I don’t know so much about doomsday as some people pretend to; but you see, sir, it’s not finished yet.”

“Thank you,” I said; “that’s just what I meant.  You thought I was hasty in my judgment of your coffin; whereas I only said of it knowingly what you said of the world thoughtlessly.  How do you know that the world is finished anymore than your coffin?  And how dare you then say that it is a bad job?”

The same respectfully scornful smile passed over his face, as much as to say, “Ah! it’s your trade to talk that way, so I must not be too hard upon you.”

“At any rate, sir,” he said, “whoever made it has taken long enough about it, a person would think, to finish anything he ever meant to finish.”

“One day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day,” I said.

“That’s supposing,” he answered, “that the Lord did make the world.  For my part, I am half of a mind that the Lord didn’t make it at all.”

“I am very glad to hear you say so,” I answered.

Hereupon I found that we had changed places a little.  He looked up at me.  The smile of superiority was no longer there, and a puzzled questioning, which might indicate either “Who would have expected that from you?” or, “What can he mean?” or both at once, had taken its place.  I, for my part, knew that on the scale of the man’s judgment I had risen nearer to his own level.  As he said nothing, however, and I was in danger of being misunderstood, I proceeded at once.

“Of course it seems to me better that you should not believe God had done a thing, than that you should believe He had not done it well!”

“Ah!  I see, sir.  Then you will allow there is some room for doubting whether He made the world at all?”