unkindly did not greatly alleviate
the impatience that he felt from time to time. He had formed a higher
estimate of McCrae's abilities than that generally prevailing throughout
the parish; and in spite of, perhaps because of his attitude, was
drawn toward the man. This attitude, as Hodder analyzed it from the
expressions he occasionally surprised on his assistant's face, was one
of tolerance and experience, contemplating, with a faint amusement and
a certain regret, the wasteful expenditure of youthful vitality. Yet
it involved more. McCrae looked as if he knew--knew many things that he
deemed it necessary for the new rector to find out by experience.

But he was a difficult man to talk to.

If the truth be told, the more Hodder became absorbed in these
activities of the parish house, the greater grew his perplexity, the
more acute his feeling of incompleteness; or rather, his sense that the
principle was somehow fundamentally at fault. Out of the waters of
the proletariat they fished, assiduously and benignly, but at random,
strange specimens! brought them, as it were, blinking to the light, and
held them by sheer struggling. And sometimes, when they slipped away,
dived after them. The young curate, Mr. Tompkinson, for the most part
did the diving; or, in scriptural language, the searching after the lost
sheep.

The results accomplished seemed indeed, as Mr. Parr had remarked,
strangely disproportionate to the efforts, for they laboured abundantly.
The Italian mothers appeared stolidly appreciative of the altruism of
Miss Ramsay, who taught the kindergarten, in taking their charges off
their hands for three hours of a morning, and the same might be said of
the Jews and Germans and Russians. The newsboys enjoyed the gymnasium
and reading-rooms: some of them were drafted into the choir, yet
the singing of Te Deums failed somehow to accomplish the miracle of
regeneration. The boys, as a rule, were happier, no doubt; the new
environments not wholly without results. But the rector was an idealist.

He strove hard to become their friend, and that of the men; to win their
confidence, and with a considerable measure of success. On more than one
occasion he threw aside his clerical coat and put on boxing-gloves, and
he gave a series of lectures, with lantern slides, collected during
the six months he had once spent in Europe. The Irish-Americans and the
Germans were the readiest to respond, and these were for the most part