nd the dry pan and gradual fire, if we can't have the things
themselves, Sir? What's the use of painting the fire round a poor
fellow, when you think it won't do to kindle one under him,--as they did
at Valencia or Valladolid, or wherever it was?

--What story is that?--I said.

Why,--he answered,--at the last auto-da-fe, in 1824 or '5, or somewhere
there,--it's a traveller's story, but a mighty knowing traveller he
is,--they had a "heretic" to use up according to the statutes provided
for the crime of private opinion. They could n't quite make up their
minds to burn him, so they only hung him in a hogshead painted all over
with flames!

No, Sir! when a man calls you names because you go to the ballot-box
and vote for your candidate, or because you say this or that is your
opinion, he forgets in which half of the world he was born, Sir! It
won't be long, Sir, before we have Americanized religion as we have
Americanized government; and then, Sir, every soul God sends into
the world will be good in the face of all men for just so much of His
"inspiration" as "giveth him understanding"!--None of my words, Sir!
none of my words!

--If Iris does not love this Little Gentleman, what does love look like
when one sees it? She follows him with her eyes, she leans over toward
him when he speaks, her face changes with the changes of his speech, so
that one might think it was with her as with Christabel,--

That all her features were resigned
To this sole image in her mind.

But she never looks at him with such intensity of devotion as when he
says anything about the soul and the soul's atmosphere, religion.

Women are twice as religious as men;--all the world knows that.
Whether they are any better, in the eyes of Absolute Justice, might be
questioned; for the additional religious element supplied by sex hardly
seems to be a matter of praise or blame. But in all common aspects they
are so much above us that we get most of our religion from them,--from
their teachings, from their example,--above all, from their pure
affections.

Now this poor little Iris had been talked to strangely in her childhood.
Especially she had been told that she hated all good things,--which
every sensible parent knows well enough is not true of a great many
children, to say the least. I have sometimes questioned whether many
libels on human nature had not been a natural consequence of the
celibacy of the clergy, which was enf