I took one in my hand.  “I think they are only fossil sponges,” I said; “there will only be a rusty sort of core inside.”

“You know that!” he said, brightening up; “you know about stones too?  But these are not sponges—­they would rattle if they were—­no, they contain crystals—­I am sure of it.  Come and see!”

We went into the stable-yard.  Father Payne fetched a hammer, and then selected a convenient place in the cobbled yard to break the stones.  He put one of them in position, and aimed a blow at it, but it glanced off, and the stone flew off with the impact to some distance.  “Lie still, can’t you?” said Father Payne, apostrophising the stone, and adding, “This is for my pleasure, not for yours.”  I recovered the stone, and brought it back, and Father Payne broke it with a well-directed blow.  He gathered up the pieces eagerly.  “Yes,” he said, “it’s all right—­they are blue crystals:  better than I had hoped.”

He handed a fragment to me to look at.  The inside of the stone was hollow.  It had a coagulated appearance, and was thickly coated with minute bluish crystals, very beautiful.

“I don’t know that I ever saw a stone I liked as well as this,” said Father Payne, musing over another piece.  “Think what millions of years this has been like that,—­before Abraham was!  It has never seen the light of day before—­it’s a splash of some molten stone, which fell plop into a cool sea-current, I suppose.  I wish I knew all about it.  The question, is, why is it so beautiful?  It couldn’t help it, I suppose!  But for whose delight?” Then he said, “I suppose this was a vacuum in here till it was broken?  That is why it is so clear and fresh.  Good Heavens, what would I not give to know why this thing cooled into these lovely little shapes.  It’s no use talking about the laws of matter—­why are the laws of matter what they are, and not different?  And odder still, why do I like the look of it?”

“Perhaps that is a law of matter too,” I said.

“Oh, shut up!” said Father Payne to me.  “But I understand—­and of course the temptation is to believe that this was all done on your account and mine.  That is as odd a thing as the stone itself, if you come to think of it, that we should be made so that we refer everything to ourselves, and to believe that God prepared this pretty show for us.”

“I suppose we come in somewhere?” I said.

“Yes, we are allowed to see it,” said Father Payne.  “But it wasn’t arranged for the benefit of a silly old man like me.  That is the worst of our religious theories—­that we believe that God is for ever making personal appeals to us.  It is that sort of self-importance which spoils everything.”

“But I can hardly believe that we have this sense of self-importance only to get rid of it,” I said.  “It all seems to me a dreadful muddle—­to shut up these lovely little things inside millions of stones, and then to give us the wish to break a couple, only that we may reflect that they were not meant for us to see at all.”