at you would take back now?"

He pondered, wrinkling his forehead. "Well, but all the same, didn't we
give the present hour a pretty black eye?"

"The present hour deserves a black eye, and two of them!"

He surveyed me squarely. "I believe you're a pessimist!"

"That is the first trashy thing I've heard you say."

"Thank you! At least admit you're scarcely an optimist."

"Optimist! Pessimist! Why, you're talking just like a newspaper!"

He laughed. "Oh, don't compare a gentleman to a newspaper."

"Then keep your vocabulary clean of bargain-counter words. A while ago
the journalists had a furious run upon the adjective 'un-American.'
Anybody or anything that displeased them was 'un-American.' They ran it
into the ground, and in its place they have lately set up 'pessimist,'
which certainly has a threatening appearance. They don't know its
meaning, and in their mouths it merely signifies that what a man says
snakes them feel personally uncomfortable. The word has become a dusty
rag of slang. The arrested burglar very likely calls the policeman a
pessimist; and, speaking reverently and with no intention to shock
you, the scribes and Pharisees would undoubtedly have called Christ a
pessimist when He called them hypocrites, had they been acquainted with
the word."

Once more my remarks drew from the boy an unexpected rejoinder. We had
turned into Worship Street, and, as we passed the churchyard, he stopped
and laid his hand upon the railing of the pate.

"You don't shock me," he said; and then: "But you would shock my aunts."
He paused, gazing into the churchyard, before he continued more slowly:
"And so should I--if they knew it--shock them."

"If they knew what?" I asked.

His hand indicated a sculptured crucifix near by.

"Do you believe everything still?" he answered. "Can you?"

As he looked at me, I suppose that he read negation in my eyes.

"No more can I," he murmured. Again he looked in among the tombstones
and flowers, where the old custodian saw us and took off his hat.
"Howdy, Daddy Ben!" John Mayrant returned pleasantly, and then resuming
to me: "No more can I believe everything." Then he gave a brief, comical
laugh. "And I hope my aunts won't find that out! They would think me
gone to perdition indeed. But I always go to church here" (he pointed to
the quiet building, which, for all its modest size and simplicity, had
a stately and inexpressible charm), "because I like to kneel where
my mother