themselves
to the minds of the oldest inhabitants. However, even the oldest
inhabitants breathed a deep sigh of relief, when finally they were
housed in the brand-new church up beside the college campus, a real
stone church, with transepts and painted windows and choir-stalls
within, and a cloister and a grand tall tower without. The ramshackle
old wooden church had been dear to them, had even remained dear to them
after the railroad had laid down its tracks under their very eaves; but
they were fretted by the crudely caustic comments of strangers coming
to the town, and they were still more fretted when the puffing,
screeching Sunday trains drowned the voice of the good old rector whose
mannerly traditions forbade his puffing and screeching in his turn.

He had been a dear old rector, rotund and pompous; and his surplice had
been fully as long and voluminous as a Mother Hubbard nightie. Possibly
it was on that account, to equalize the demand for muslin, that, in
those same old days, the choir had worn no surplices at all, but had
been accustomed to come tramping into church in all the bravery of sack
coats and violent haberdashery. Indeed, upon the part of certain of the
congregation, there had been a tendency to regard it as a finger-post
to Rome, when some younger member of the vestry suggested putting the
ban on scarlet neckties. Saint Peter's Parish was set like a holy
beacon in the very midst of a valley which was tainted with heresies
Arian and unspeakable, tainted so thoroughly that the ritualistic
development of Saint Peter's was delayed for decades upon that account.

Later, Saint Peter's became far wiser in its generation. Its policy had
been to extend a cordial welcome to all men of whatever creed, and its
early fathers had felt that it was surer to attract the more unstable
of its neighbours, if it held its threshold at the common level of them
all. In course of time, however, wisdom dawned and broadened to a
perfect day of psychological common sense. A theological reaction, of
whatever sort, was bound in the last analysis to be a matter of a
sudden leap, not of a deliberate slide. One either took a veritable
ski-jump into the next church but three, or else one merely stayed
where one was, and fretted about the details of the service.

It was now a good twenty years and more since Saint Peter's had
abandoned its old barracks of a church and moved up town into its new
quarters. As a matter of course, it ha