shirk
the resolute honest work that brings wages, and he will presently find himself
dreaming of a possible benefactor, a possible simpleton who may be cajoled into
using his interest, a possible state of mind in some possible person not yet
forthcoming. Let him neglect the responsibilities of his office, and he will
inevitably anchor himself on the chance, that the thing left undone may turn out
not to be of the supposed importance. Let him betray his friend's confidence,
and he will adore that same cunning complexity called Chance, which gives him
the hope that his friend will never know. Let him forsake a decent craft that he
may pursue the gentilities of a profession to which nature never called him, and
his religion will infallibly be the worship of blessed Chance, which he will
believe in as the mighty creator of success. The evil principle deprecated in
that religion, is the orderly sequence by which the seed brings forth a crop
after its kind.
 

                                   Chapter X

Justice Malam was naturally regarded in Tarley and Raveloe as a man of capacious
mind, seeing that he could draw much wider conclusions without evidence than
could be expected of his neighbours who were not on the Commission of the Peace.
Such a man was not likely to neglect the clue of the tinder-box, and an inquiry
was set on foot concerning a pedlar, name unknown, with curly black hair and a
foreign complexion, carrying a box of cutlery and jewellery, and wearing large
rings in his ears. But either because inquiry was too slow-footed to overtake
him, or because the description applied to so many pedlars that inquiry did not
know how to choose among them, weeks passed away, and there was no other result
concerning the robbery than a gradual cessation of the excitement it had caused
in Raveloe. Dunstan Cass's absence was hardly a subject of remark: he had once
before had a quarrel with his father, and had gone off, nobody knew whither, to
return at the end of six weeks, take up his old quarters unforbidden and swagger
as usual. His own family, who equally expected this issue, with the sole
difference that the Squire was determined this time to forbid him the old
quarters, never mentioned his absence; and when his uncle Kimble or Mr. Osgood
noticed it, the story of his having killed Wildfire and committed some offence
against his father was enough to prevent surprise. To connect the fact of
Dunsey's disappearance with that of the robbery occurring on the same day, lay
quite away from the track of every one's thought - even Godfrey's, who had
better