"Oh, but I do!" interrupted Ichabod with rising energy. "Here as everywhere. We Englishmen boast of our cool heads, and call ourselves rational people, but with no more right to the name than the devoutest old Greeks or most besotted Catholic peasants.'

"What next?" said Hammond. "Perhaps we build temples, then, and offer lambs and incense to Apollo or Aphrodite or Hebe or Pan? Go on."

"Not by those names," Ichabod replied. "What I say is that fine art, and love, and youth, and beauty, and nature, are practically worshipped all the world over, and sacrificed to with a veneration I call superstitious. We pity the benighted ignorance of people who bow down to the Madonna and saints; but to living and fictitious ideals of purity, piety, self-devotion, and other so-called graces, we pay a credulous admiration that would be ludicrous merely, if it wasn't such a lamentable exhibition of human folly."

"This is news," said Hammond, as Ichabod paused for breath, "at least to me, and from you." ("When I go and report this at the club," he added to himself, "they won't believe me !") "And since when, pray, have you fallen out with our social system?

66 I don't know that we ever were friends. If up to now I took care not to speak my mind to people who couldn't understand it, I had a good reason. I was a novice, and I should simply have been poohpoohed as such; but now that I've given your society a trial I know your Belgravia and your Bohemia from the bubbles on the surface to the dregs below, and I assure you that, if the world has power to move me at all, it is to exasperate me by its inconsistencies. It is high time to throw off the mask, and I will tell you, and anyone that

asks me, that it is to this, the Adoration of Sentiment, that I for one am going to declare war-war to the knife."

"War to the nib, do you mean?" asked Hammond, laughing. He had a dim recollection of having read something like this before in some book or magazine, and began to have an idea of where his friend was taking him to, but he resolutely declined to accompany him. Paradoxy was certainly not his doxy. Startling opinions were all very amusing things to talk about, but it was awful when a man began to act up to them. "So you've quarrelled with the world and challenged it, and do you want to fight it now-one against all? I call it a risky, thankless task, a little game where nobody wins-so it won't pay, Ichabod, my word for it."

"Well, what of that?" said Ichabod. "I take it gain and loss are mostly fictions of our imagi nations; but I'm sick of pretending to join in this paper-chase they call life. That ordinary men will hear for my speaking, see for my showing, or follow for my leading, might be too much to expect, slaves as they are to prejudice and ignorance."

"In the name of all ordinary men," put in Hammond pertly, "I thank you."

"Can you here, between ourselves, honestly deny a word I have said?”

"Oh, I deny it all," said Hammond resolutely, adding, sotto voce, "and I'll venture to say I never heard such mad nonsense in all my life."

"The proofs stare you everywhere in the face," continued Ichabod convincingly. "Take an illustration,

this Johannisberger before us now. There's a type of the world!"

Amen," sighed Hammond piously, emptying his glass.

"Do you know of what it is made? Grapes-yes, but which? Those that are rotten and decayed, something it would revolt you even to touch. That's the secret substance of our Imperial wine we prize so highly. A good emblem of the secret history of the gods of our idolatry, whatever they seem. A little sharp inquiry and analysis would show us the substance as it is-corrupt, corrupt, a thing we should turn away from in contempt and disgust. Perhaps you can understand now how it irritates me to see the delusions under which men and women live and labour, delusions too many for the most energetic reformer to take and break, one by one. But it strikes

me that, if men could once be taught how to test their infatuations, and make a habit of it, we should soon have seen the last of these chimeras, for under that magic touch all the most enchanting pictures of fancy, hope, and memory would

re

solve themselves into what they are, dust and ashes. And the best, the only means I see to this end would be the extinction of, or rather reducing to a minimum, the emotional element in human nature. Here is a cause that seems to me not unworthy of a rational being; I mean to engage in it actively myself; and all thinking men who have courage should second me. Join with Hammond, so far as to admit

me,

Ichabod stopped short; for Hammond, whose silence had here not meant assent, but rather a polite negative, stood before him holding out his hand, saying,

"Not to night, thanks; I've an appointment at the club, and must leave you. Good night."

"I've no taste for sermons," he thought, as he went downstairs, "and I think my poor friend's mind is wandering."

"There goes the most feather

headed mortal of my acquaintance!" was Ichabod's comment. "One dose of my views has been enough to upset him."

Dick Hammond re-appeared that night at the club with a seriocomic expression that excited facetious remark.

"It's no laughing matter," said he, shaking his head. "Poor Ichabod, he's quite gone, you know." "Dead, do you mean?"

Worse deranged," tapping his forehead.

Chorus of questions and comments: "Is it in the family ?" "Not that I know of." "Opium or absinthe?" "Neither." "Disappointed in love?" "Oh, not that," returned Hammond, with a laugh, "but it strikes me he's been reading too many magazines."

And he proceeded to give a humorous account of their interview, a little embellished of course, which afforded considerable amusement to his hearers.

"What is he going to do next?" asked one.

"That's more than I'll venture to foretel," said Hammond; "but, as I take it, he's a sort of Don Quixote turned the wrong way; off on a general crusade against all the consolations of life; where he's perfectly certain to get his head punched-I can say no more."

It was altogether a bad look-out for Ichabod. But Hammond had won his dozen of champagne.

CHAPTER III.

"READING too many magazines," that might be true, but never the whole truth. The clue to this was to be found in the man's strange character alone, which had by this time become pretty independent of outward circumstances.

Every man, as we know, has three distinct selves-physical, moral, and intellectual. The absolute perfec

tion of a hero must be the perfection and harmony of these three in

one.

Our hero's physique left little to be desired. Nature and his parents and guardians had taken care of that, and here he had consented to let well alone. Of brains, again, he had no lack. But, with sin-. gular pertinacity, he had all his life been working steadily with all the force of intellect and will to suppress his feelings, and already so far succeeded as to disturb the balance of his composition, and bring about a state so apparently awry that most people, looking into his mind, would have agreed with Hammond that much reading, much learning, much something, had made him mad.

Mad or sane, he was not content with having tried the experiment on himself, but desired to extend it to his fellow-men. Everybody has a mission in this world; and the only one that tempted him was that of a spiritual iconoclast.

He was unaffected by ridicule, which was all his first confession of faith had elicited from his first listener. To have effected off-hand the conversion of a man of Hammond's stamp would have been to start by working a miracle; and miracles did not enter into Ichabod's scheme. His future course of action he was as yet content to leave indefinite-to be dictated by circumstances. Heartily he wished all the idols of the world -religious, political, social, artistic-had but one neck, that he might break it. Failing this, he would take them in order of importance, beginning, therefore, with the first-named.

London offered little scope for such a campaign. People there were too busy with a thousand other matters. But there was Bury St. Martin's, an old cathedral town, the home of Ichabod's child

hood, and of which he retained a strong impression as a nest of ideas as antiquated as its cathedral. For cathedrals, church music, pictures-everything that linked religion and art he entertained a direct hostility. Controversies about creeds and dogmas were tolerable-might possibly be of use as a good intellectual gymnastic exercise; but the sentiment of devotion and celestial flights of fancy were in his judgment nothing more than the root of evils innumerable, incalculable.

He had not been near the old place for ten years; and welcomed a slight formal errand of business that just at this time chanced to take him down there for a day or two. Not for love of auld lang syne, but because the visit might afford him special opportunities for studying the growths he desired to eradicate.

So he mused as he took his seat in a first-class carriage of the express to Bury St. Martin's one afternoon. There was certainly nothing about the outer man that denoted the missionary; and the idea that they were travelling with an adventurer of reform was probably the last that would have suggested itself to his fellowtravellers.

These were a young man and two ladies, brother and sisters apparently. There was an indefinable look of distinction about the trio, and, as their conversation did not run entirely upon the weather and partridge shooting, Ichabod condescended to listen to it. Nay, several times he felt tempted to join in, in order to contradict, and to prove to them how utterly wrong some of the opinions they expressed were; but the noisy rattle of the train forbade conversation except between people who agreed with each other.

Both girls were pretty, very well dressed, and had pleasing manners. What were the personal and mental defects these arts and graces were meant to conceal, Ichabod, of course, could only conjecture. He supposed they were legion, but nevertheless he felt half sorry when the journey came to an end.

They

all left the train at Bury St. Martin's, and Ichabod found himself following with his eyes the eldest and prettiest girl, and watching the little black hat and feather till they were out of sight as the party drove off from the station in a light waggonette.

Then he blushed for his own weakness; but consoled himself with the idea that perhaps after all it was only a reflex action on the part of his eyes, an automatic contraction of the optic nerve, with which his will had nothing to do.

Leaving his luggage at the station, he walked off into the town in the direction of the cathedral.

It was growing dusk, and Bury St. Martin's at this curfew hour seemed quiet and indoors. Picturesque views met him down the narrow streets; here and there stood out houses with curiously carved fronts and crocketted gables, quaint old inns with grotesque signboards, brown parapets and wooden balconies, set with red geraniums and mignonette. The town was full of touches of an old English local colour become rare, but lingering yet in certain spots, where it is stamped in so fast that it dies hard. He stood before a large, old carved stone gateway, a little the worse for wear, but a piece of work as solid as it was picturesque, having answered all purposes, both as a gate and as a thing of beauty, from Chaucer's time until to-day, and stirring up childish associations within him in spite of himself. Passing through, he found himself in an open precinct. Before him,

commanding the town, filling the sky, rose the Minster, grim and grey in the twilight.

Not the Sphinx of Memphis, the Attic Parthenon, the Roman Colisseum, the Moor's Alhambra, are more eloquent monuments of their place and nation than such a Gothic cathedral. Bury St. Martin's was a chronicle in stone; for anyone who knew the language. First there spoke the broad general type of its beauty-a sublime mass of minute decoration, so characteristic of the master builders who invented it. The Norman transept, with its stern, massive outlines, its exuberant, half-grotesque ornamentation, with here and there a touch from Italy, a Romanesque graft upon a rude Northern tree, was another page of our ancient history he who runs may read. Next the pointed arches of our English Gothic took up the parable-a style silently declaring itself akin to the foreigner, yet distinct, like the English language-a style that tantalises by promising to bloom into the perfection of beauty, a point it is just reaching, when the inevitable John Bull steps in and decides that not grace but strength is to have preference and prominence here. The majestic steeple, a crown of sculptured stone, completed the tale, rising like a giant through the floating evening mists.

It looked as defiant as Morgante, and much more invincible.

Ichabod's animosity, like Or lando's, rose at the sight. If that architecture spoke to him at all, it was in an unknown tongue, and the organ, striking up at this moment, irritated him afresh. That instrument was his pet aversion, and in his Utopia he would have it forbidden. For there was something peculiar he believed in its vibrations, which, by playing on the acoustic nerves, had the effect of over-stimulating the religious emotions.

Not his, however. Cold and censorious, he passed through the porch and entered the building.

A special service was going on, and a celebrated preacher had just begun to hold forth to an attentive crowd which crammed the nave. Ichabod's cup was now full. The popular preacher was one of his bêtes noires (he had a whole menagerie). He found a chair and sat down to enjoy a little feast of ridicule over the nonsense he expected-not without reason-to hear from that pulpit, while Dr. Anselm, unconscious of the presence of the goat among the sheep, was haranguing the latter with confidence and unction.

Certainly for the hour he marshalled those thousand minds as easily as Napoleon the movements of a column of soldiers. But Ichabod was not to laugh after all. This time he had mistaken his man. There was no denying certain rare merits to that renowned divine. He had a voice any speaker might envy; his elocution was faultless, his manner, delivery, style, all exceptionally, provokingly good. Expecting a vapid platitudinarian, Ichabod had stumbled on a clever orator, and, instead of ordinary lame pulpit English, was listening to a flow of easy, attractive, expressive rhetoric.

The preacher had taken the Hebrew prophet Elijah for his theme. No doubt there was much in the strange changes and chances of that, an orator's life, that struck a chord in his heart, and speaking with sympathy he spoke with originality. Even when the matter was old, the manner was very new, at least to his hearers. Accustomed from that very pulpit to have certain dry morsels of doctrine crammed down the congregational throat every Sunday, they were rivetted by a man who did nothing

of the sort, and aimed rather at rousing fresh trains of thought in their minds than at giving them a little map of his own orthodox soul for their imitation.

No wolf, certainly, unless in the sense of being facile princeps of the sheep. Ichabod must give his enemy fair play. He looked at the man in the pulpit-saw on that countenance the stamp of intellect, culture, refinement, and insinuating sensibility, looked from him to the sea of half-soulless faces beneathfaces of petty-minded men and women, whose comfort-and-moneyserving lives even they at times felt unsatisfying, as their eager attention here showed-and he recognised the authority of a single highly wrought nature over a sluggish herd; the force of the lightning that splits the oak.

But, if he might not laugh, he must frown at what he said to himself was an outrageous force illapplied.

If only he could have stood up, and preached to the people that they were being carried away by their feelings. Alas, it is not every speaker who can make himself heard in a building five hundred feet long; nor, even then, who can make himself listened to, for the prestige of Dr. Anselm does not fall into the mouth of a man at thirty; nor even then who can impose attention upon such listeners.

King Mob is a vampire. The simplest way to bring him round you is to risk life and limbs, like the gladiators or Blondin, to catch his applause. Let nobody count upon getting his ear for nothing, or even cheaply. Give him some proof of the vital effort, the irreparable sacrifice you have made, and then he may perhaps give you a hearing.

Ichabod waited till the sermon had come to an end, and the organ begun again. Then he left the