t reason will strive for further
triumphs, more resounding perorations. He introduced scraps of
Welsh--all his auto-intoxicated brain could remember (How physically
true was that taunt of Dizzy's--"Inebriated with the exuberance of
his own verbosity!").

And the delighted audience shouted back "You're the man we want!
Into Parliament you shall go, Davy-bach" and much else. So David
restored the five villages to sobriety in life and faith, yet left
them with a new enthusiasm kindled. Before he departed on his return
to London and the grind of his profession, he had effected another
change. Because he had spoken as he had spoken and touched the
hearts of emotional people, they came trickling back to his father's
church, to the "British" Church, as David now called it. Little
Bethel was empty, and the pastor-blacksmith not yet out of the
asylum at Swansea. The Revd. Howel Williams trod on air. His sermons
became terribly long and involved, but that was no drawback in the
minds of his Welsh auditory; though it made his son swear inwardly
and reconciled him to the approaching return to Fig Tree Court. The
old Druid felt inspired to convince the hundred people present that
the Church they had returned to _was_ the Church of their fathers,
not only back to Roman times, when Glamorganshire was basking in an
Italian civilization, but further still. He showed how the Druids
were rather to be described as Ante-Christian than Anti--with an
_i_; and played ponderously on this quip. In Druidism, he
observed--I am sure I cannot think why, but it was his hobby--you
had a remarkable foreshadowing of Christianity; the idea of the
human sacrifice, the Atonement, the Communion of Saints, the mystic
Vine, which he clumsily identified with the mistletoe, and what not
else. He read portions of his privately-published _Tales of
Taliessin_. In short such happiness radiated from his pink-cheeked
face and recovered eyes that David regretted in no wise his own
lapses into conventional, stereotyped religion. The Church of
Britain might be stiff and stomachered, as the offspring of
Elizabeth, but it was stately, it was respectable--as outwardly was
the great virgin Queen--and it was easy to live with. Only he
counselled his father to do two things: never to preach for more
than half-an-hour--even if it meant keeping a small American clock
going inside the pulpit-ledge; and to obtain a curate, so that the
new enthusiasm might not cool and his fathe