rsecutor, and Torquemada,
away from his religion, was as kind-hearted a man as ever lived. Calvin
was a good man, but he watched Servetus burn, and our own Pilgrim
Fathers on the other side were just about as hard men as any when it
came to arguing out a religious question with whips and pillories and
thumbscrews, and the like. I don't want to offend any one's sentiment or
question any one's faith. To each man the belief that satisfies him, but
personally I have no use for a religion that can't get itself believed
without persecution."

"I quite agree with you there, Professor," replied Merrill, who felt a
little chilled by the perfect aloofness with which the other spoke, and
was wondering what his dear old father, living his quiet, saintly life
among the Derbyshire dales, would have thought of such cold-blooded
heresy. "I have always looked upon that sort of brutal intolerance as a
form of religious mania--sincere, but still mania, and the story of it
is the most awful chapter in human history----"

"Except, perhaps, the story of war," interrupted Professor Marmion, with
a snap in his voice. Monomania, more or less harmless, is a not
infrequent affliction of very high intelligences, and a quite
unreasoning hatred of war was his, although within the last few days he
had come to suspect disquieting misgivings on the subject, possibly in
consequence of the higher knowledge to which he was attaining.

"My dear sir," replied Merrill quite good-humouredly, and not at all
sorry for the diversion, "I am glad to say that I agree with you also.
No man who has not actually fought can have any just idea of the
appalling abominations of war, and I am sure that no men hate it more
devotedly than those who have to fight. But we have to take the world as
it is, and not as we would like it to be; and as long as we have people
in it who want to set it on fire for their own brutally selfish
purposes, we shall have to keep the fire-extinguishers in good order."

In obedience to an appealing glance from his daughter, the Professor did
not reply. His opponent in the bloodless arena of Science saved him by
interrupting:

"Yes, sir. I differ from my friend Marmion on a good many points, and
that's one of them. You have the honour to serve in the biggest
fire-extinguishing institution on earth. It was the British Navy that
put out Napoleon's bonfire that he was making of the world: you kept the
ring round us and Spain, and round Russia a