ot of love, but of
gracious age, having the aloof beauty of age and its true estimates of
life. The perception of its loveliness is impersonal and leaves the
line between the aesthetic and the sensuous clearly marked. Beneath a
straighter sun the line is blurred and sometimes vanishes: no
orchid-musk, no azure and distant hill, no tinted bay but accosts the
senses, confusing one with another, mingling all the emotions in a
single cup, persuading man that he knows good from evil as little as
though he lived still in Eden. From such stealthy influences the man
of rigid convictions is often in more danger than the man of no
convictions at all, for rigid convictions rather often indicate
inexperience and imperfect observation; experience,
therefore--especially emotional experience--sometimes warps them into
strange and hideous shapes.

Simpson did not find in the bush the enlightenment that he had hoped
for. He did, however, anaesthetize his mind into the belief that he
had found it. Returning, he approached Port au Prince by a route new
to him. A well-beaten trail aroused his curiosity and he followed it
into a grove of ceiba and mahogany. It was clear under foot, as no
tropic grove uncared for by man can be clear; in the middle of it lay
the ashes of a great fire, and three minaca-palm huts in good repair
huddled almost invisible under the vast trees. The ground, bare of
grass, was trodden hard, as though a multitude had stamped it
down--danced it down, perhaps--and kept it bare by frequent use.

"What a place for a camp-meeting!" thought Simpson as he turned to
leave it. "God's cathedral aisles, and roofed by God's blue sky."

His pony shied and whirled around, a long snake--a
fer-de-lance--flowed across the path.

The desire to hold his services in the grove remained in his mind; the
only reason he did not transfer them there at once was that he was not
yet quite sure of his people. They came eagerly to hear him, they
reflected his enthusiasm at his behest, they wept and praised God.
Yet, underneath all his hopes and all his pride in what he had done
ran a cold current of doubt, an undefined and indefinable fear of
something devilish and malign that might thwart him in the end. He
thrust it resolutely out of his mind.

V

"I have told your people--your _canaille_," said Father Antoine, "that
I shall excommunicate them all."

The priest had been graver than his wont--more dignified, less
volcanic, as though h