are degraded into shops. In so far as the
throng is not busied with itself, its attention is upon the roadway,
where is ever passing a festival procession of Success, its floats of
Worth Rewarded being the costliest and shiniest of the carriage-maker's
craft--eloquent of true dignity and fineness even in the swift silence
of their rubber tires. This is a spectacle to be viewed seriously; to be
mocked at only by the flippant, though the moving pedestrian mass on the
sidewalk is gayer of colour, more sentient--more companionable, more
understandably human.

It was in this weaving mass on the walk that the communicants of St.
Antipas were often refreshed by the vision of their rector on pleasant
afternoons. Here the Reverend Doctor Linford loved to walk in God's
sunlight out of sheer simple joy in living--happily undismayed by any
possible consciousness that his progress turned all faces to regard him,
as inevitably as one would turn the spokes of an endless succession of
turnstyles.

Habited with an obviously loving attention to detail, yet with tasteful
restraint, a precise and frankly confessed, yet never obtrusive,
elegance, bowing with a manner to those of his flock favoured by heaven
to meet him, superbly, masculinely handsome, he was far more than a mere
justification of the pride St. Antipas felt in him. He was a splendid
inspiration to belief in God and man.

Nor was he of the type Pharasaic--the type to profess love for its kind,
yet stay scrupulously aloof from the vanquished and court only the
victors. Indeed, this was not so.

In the full tide of his progress--it was indeed a progress and never a
mere walk--he would stop to address a few words of simple cheer to the
aged female mendicant--perhaps to make a joke with her--some pleasantry
not unbefitting his station, his mien denoting a tender chivalry which
has been agreeably subdued though not impaired by the experience
inevitable to a man of the world. When he dropped the coin into the
withered palm, he did it with a certain lingering hurriedness, as one
frankly unable to repress a human weakness, though nervously striving to
have it over quickly and by stealth.

Young Rigby Reeves, generalising, as it later appeared, from inadequate
data, swore once that the rector of St. Antipas kept always an eye ahead
for the female mendicant in the tattered shawl and the bonnet of
inferior modishness; that, if the Avenue was crowded enough to make it
seem worth whi