e had never shaken his fist in thirty years, and as
for the Rev. Fareforth Furlong, he was incapable of it.

But the Rev. Uttermust Dumfarthing told his congregation that he was
convinced that at least seventy per cent of them were destined for
eternal punishment; and he didn't call it by that name, but labelled it
simply and forcibly "hell." The word had not been heard in any church
in the better part of the City for a generation. The congregation was
so swelled next Sunday that the minister raised the percentage to
eighty-five, and everybody went away delighted. Young and old flocked
to St. Osoph's. Before a month had passed the congregation at the
evening service at St. Asaph's Church was so slender that the
offertory, as Mr. Furlong senior himself calculated, was scarcely
sufficient to pay the overhead charge of collecting it.

The presence of so many young men sitting in serried files close to the
front was the only feature of his congregation that extorted from the
Rev. Mr. Dumfarthing something like approval.

"It is a joy to me to see," he remarked to several of his trustees,
"that there are in the City so many godly young men, whatever the
elders may be."

But there may have been a secondary cause at work, for among the godly
young men of Plutoria Avenue the topic of conversation had not been,
"Have you heard the new presbyterian minister?" but, "Have you seen his
daughter? You haven't? Well, say!"

For it turned out that the "child" of Dr. Uttermust Dumfarthing,
so-called by the trustees, was the kind of child that wears a little
round hat, straight from Paris, with an upright feather in it, and a
silk dress in four sections, and shoes with high heels that would have
broken the heart of John Calvin. Moreover, she had the distinction of
being the only person on Plutoria Avenue who was not one whit afraid of
the Reverend Uttermust Dumfarthing. She even amused herself, in
violation of all rules, by attending evening service at St. Asaph's,
where she sat listening to the Reverend Edward, and feeling that she
had never heard anything so sensible in her life.

"I'm simply dying to meet your brother," she said to Mrs. Tom Overend,
otherwise Philippa; "he's such a complete contrast with father." She
knew no higher form of praise: "Father's sermons are always so
frightfully full of religion."

And Philippa promised that meet him she should.

But whatever may have been the effect of the presence of Catherine
D