ple living
in the outskirts, who wished to get in to church of a Sunday morning. He
was imprudent enough to mention this in conversation with one of his new
parishioners. Then he learned, to his considerable chagrin, that when
this line was built, some years before, a bitter war of words had been
fought upon the question of its being worked on the Sabbath day. The
then occupant of the Methodist pulpit had so distinguished himself
above the rest by the solemnity and fervor of his protests against this
insolent desecration of God's day that the Methodists of Octavius
still felt themselves peculiarly bound to hold this horse-car line, its
management, and everything connected with it, in unbending aversion. At
least once a year they were accustomed to expect a sermon denouncing it
and all its impious Sunday patrons. Theron made a mental resolve that
this year they should be disappointed.

Another burning problem, which he had not been called upon before to
confront, he found now entangled with the mysterious line which divided
a circus from a menagerie. Those itinerant tent-shows had never come his
way heretofore, and he knew nothing of that fine balancing proportion
between ladies in tights on horseback and cages full of deeply
educational animals, which, even as the impartial rain, was designed
to embrace alike the just and the unjust. There had arisen inside the
Methodist society of Octavius some painful episodes, connected with
members who took their children "just to see the animals," and were
convicted of having also watched the Rose-Queen of the Arena, in her
unequalled flying leap through eight hoops, with an ardent and unashamed
eye. One of these cases still remained on the censorial docket of the
church; and Theron understood that he was expected to name a committee
of five to examine and try it. This he neglected to do.

He was no longer at all certain that the congregation as a whole liked
his sermons. The truth was, no doubt, that he had learned enough to
cease regarding the congregation as a whole. He could still rely upon
carrying along with him in his discourses from the pulpit a large
majority of interested and approving faces. But here, unhappily, was a
case where the majority did not rule. The minority, relatively small in
numbers, was prodigious in virile force.

More than twenty years had now elapsed since that minor schism in the
Methodist Episcopal Church, the result of which was the independent bod