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‘Your name is Fowles, isn’t it?’

He looked amazed, and seemed to think that his questioner had some special reason for asking him, and was at first disinclined to answer. But Mr. Gambier pressed him and said, ‘Your father, the Cheltenham cab-driver, asked me to look you up.’

He then admitted that he was the man, and Mr. Gambier urged him to write to his father. All this on the selfsame page as the ugly sneer about Providence!

And a dozen pages farther on I came upon a still more striking story. Commander Gambier was very unfortunate, very homesick, and very miserable in Australia. He could not make up his mind whether to stay here or return to England. ‘At last,’ he says, ‘I resolved to leave it to fate.’ The only difference that I can discover between the ‘ Providence‘ whom Commander Gambier could not trust, and the ‘ fate‘ to which he was prepared to submit all his fortunes, is that the former is spelt with a capital letter and the latter with a small one! But to the story. ‘On the road where I stood was a small bush grog-shop, and the coaches pulled up here to refresh the ever-thirsty bush traveller. At this spot the up-country and down-country coaches met, and I resolved that I would get into whichever came in first, leaving it to destiny to settle. Looking down the long, straight track over which the up-country coach must come, I saw a cloud of dust, and well can I remember the curious sensation I had that I was about to turn my back upon England for ever! But in the other direction a belt of scrub hid the view, the road making a sharp turn. And then, almost simultaneously, I heard a loud crack of a whip, and round this corner, at full gallop, came the down coach, pulling up at the shanty not three minutes before the other! I felt like a man reprieved, for my heart was really set on going home; and I jumped up into the down coach with a great sense of relief!’ And thus Mr. Gambier returned to England, became a Commander in the British Navy, and one of the most distinguished ornaments of the service. He sneers at ‘ Providence,’ yet trusts to ‘ fate,’ and leaves everything to ‘ destiny‘! The milkmaid’s may be an inexplicable confidence; but this is an inexplicable confusion. Both are being guided by the same Hand–the Hand that leads the cows home. She sees it and sings. He scouts it and sneers. That is the only difference.

Carlyle spent the early years of his literary life, until he was nearly forty, among the mosshags and isolation of Craigenputtock. It was, Froude says, the dreariest spot in all the British dominions. The house was gaunt and hungry-looking, standing like an island in a sea of morass. When he felt the lure of London, and determined to fling himself into its tumult, he took ‘one of the biggest plunges that a man might take.’ But in that hour of crisis he built his faith on one great golden word. ‘All things work together for good to them that love God,’ he wrote to his brother. And, later on, when his mother was in great distress at the departure of her son, Alick, for America, Carlyle sent her the same text. ‘You have had much to suffer, dear mother,’ he wrote, ‘and are grown old in this Valley of Tears; but you say always, as all of us should say, “Have we not many mercies too?” Is there not above all, and in all, a Father watching over us, through whom all sorrows shall yet work together for good? Yes, it is even so. Let us try to hold by that as an anchor both sure and steadfast.’ Which is another way of saying, ‘It is all right, mother mine. Let them wander as they will whilst the sun is high; when it slants through the poplars the cows will all come home!’