ing out of its siesta as Simpson followed the
cripple through the streets, somehow reassured him. Men like Bunsen
and Witherbee, who smiled at his opinions and remained cold to his
rhapsodies, always oppressed him with a sense of ineffectuality. He
knew them of old--knew them superficially, of course, for, since he
was incapable of talking impersonally about religion, he had never had
the chance to listen to the cool and yet often strangely mystical
opinions which such men hold about it. He knew, in a dim sort of way,
that men not clergymen sometimes speculated about religious matters,
seeking light from each other in long, fragmentary conversations. He
knew that much, and disapproved of it--almost resented it. It seemed
to him wrong to discuss God without becoming angry, and very wrong for
laymen to discuss God at all. When circumstances trapped him into talk
with them about things divine, he felt baffled by their silences and
their reserves, seemed to himself to be scrabbling for entrance to
their souls through some sort of a slippery, impenetrable casing; he
never tried to enter through their minds, where the door stood always
open. The trouble was that he wanted to teach and be listened to;
wherefore he was subtly more at home among the ignorant and in such
streets as he was now traversing than with educated men. He had been
born a few decades too late; here in Hayti he had stepped back a
century or so into the age of credulity. Credulity, he believed, was a
good thing, almost a divine thing, if it were properly used; he did
not carry his processes far enough to realize that credulity could
never become fixed--that it was always open to conviction. A receptive
and not an inquiring mind seemed to him the prerequisite for a
convert. And black people, he had heard, were peculiarly receptive.

The question was, then, where and how to start his work. Hayti
differed from most mission fields, for, so far as he knew, no one had
ever worked in it before him. The first step was to cultivate the
intimacy of the people, and that he found difficult in the extreme. He
had one obvious channel of approach to them; when buying necessary
things for his room, he could enter into conversation with the
shopkeepers and the market-women, but this he found it difficult to
do. They did not want to talk to him, even seemed reluctant to sell
him anything; and when he left their shops or stalls, did not answer
his "Au revoir." He wondered how