ve innocence does not seem very successful. Let
me try. What you want, my friend, is your rights. You don't want any
priests or churches. A vote, a right to speak is what you----"

"Who says I a'n't got a right to speak?" said the old man, facing round
in an irrational frenzy. "I got a right to speak. I'm a man, I am. I
don't want no votin' nor priests. I say a man's a man; that's what I
say. If a man a'n't a man, what is he? That's what I say, if a man a'n't
a man, what is he? When I sees a man, I sez 'e's a man."

"Quite so," said Turnbull, "a citizen."

"I say he's a man," said the rustic furiously, stopping and striking his
stick on the ground. "Not a city or owt else. He's a man."

"You're perfectly right," said the sudden voice of MacIan, falling like
a sword. "And you have kept close to something the whole world of today
tries to forget."

"Good night."

And the old man went on wildly singing into the night.

"A jolly old creature," said Turnbull; "he didn't seem able to get much
beyond that fact that a man is a man."

"Has anybody got beyond it?" asked MacIan.

Turnbull looked at him curiously. "Are you turning an agnostic?" he
asked.

"Oh, you do not understand!" cried out MacIan. "We Catholics are all
agnostics. We Catholics have only in that sense got as far as realizing
that man is a man. But your Ibsens and your Zolas and your Shaws and
your Tolstoys have not even got so far."

VIII. AN INTERLUDE OF ARGUMENT

Morning broke in bitter silver along the grey and level plain; and
almost as it did so Turnbull and MacIan came out of a low, scrubby wood
on to the empty and desolate flats. They had walked all night.

They had walked all night and talked all night also, and if the subject
had been capable of being exhausted they would have exhausted it.
Their long and changing argument had taken them through districts and
landscapes equally changing. They had discussed Haeckel upon hills so
high and steep that in spite of the coldness of the night it seemed as
if the stars might burn them. They had explained and re-explained
the Massacre of St. Bartholomew in little white lanes walled in with
standing corn as with walls of gold. They had talked about Mr. Kensit
in dim and twinkling pine woods, amid the bewildering monotony of
the pines. And it was with the end of a long speech from MacIan,
passionately defending the practical achievements and the solid
prosperity of the Catholic tradition, that