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THE CAUSE AND THE CAUSER. 33 consideration of the evidence, the gentler hour brought a gentler tone into the buzz of the argument. Still the Bumbles had their opinions, and bumbled freely what they thought. Bumble major, for instance, was an accidentalist," and smiled with benign contempt at the fuss everybody was making about a few common-place facts. As to attempting to explain everything that existed or happened, he wished any one patience and a long life who attempted it. He found so many things puzzling and contradictory, that he had come to the conclusion that everything happened by accident, and might have happened five hundred other ways if it had so happened it had. Consequently, it was a mere waste of time to theorize about facts, as if any sort of body or being had either the credit or the blame of causing them. Chance had caused them-it caused everything. With this simple solution in his mind it had amused him much-in spite of the sad occasion which had brought them together-(here the widow sighed audibly)-to observe the tendency everybody seemed to have to discover something beyond D