The little stone Saint and the Goblin got
on very well together, though they looked at most things from different points of view. The Saint was a philanthropist in an old fashioned way; he thought the world, as he saw it, was good, but might be improved. In particular he pitied the church mice, who were miserably poor. The Goblin, on the other hand, was of opinion that the world, as he knew it, was bad, but had better be let alone. It was the function of the church mice to be poor.
“All the same,” said the Saint, “I feel very sorry for them.”
“Of course you do,” said the Goblin; “it’s your function to feel sorry for them. If they were to leave off being poor you couldn’t fulfil your functions. You’d be a sinecure.”
He rather hoped that the Saint would ask him what a sinecure meant, but the latter took refuge in a stony silence. The Goblin might be right, but still, he thought, he would like to do something for the church mice before winter came on; they were so very poor.
Whilst he was thinking the matter over he was startled by something falling between his feet with a hard metallic clatter. It was a
bright new thaler; one of the cathedral jackdaws, who collected such things, had flown in with it to a stone cornice just above his niche, and the banging of the sacristy door had startled him into dropping it. Since the invention of gunpowder the family nerves were not what they had been.
“What have you got there?” asked the Goblin.
“A silver thaler,” said the Saint. “Really,” he continued, “it is most fortunate; now I can do something for the church mice.”
“How will you manage it?” asked the Goblin.