whole, had better not get into the newspapers."

The smile of the large proprietor broadened for a moment under
his loose, light moustache, and the other continued with increased
confidence:

"One sometimes wants to have it out with another man. The police won't
allow it in the streets--and then there's the County Council--and in the
fields even nothing's allowed but posters of pills. But in a gentleman's
garden, now----"

The strange gentleman smiled again and said, easily enough: "Do you want
to fight? What do you want to fight about?"

MacIan had understood his man pretty well up to that point; an instinct
common to all men with the aristocratic tradition of Europe had guided
him. He knew that the kind of man who in his own back garden wears good
clothes and spoils them with a bad hat is not the kind of man who has
an abstract horror of illegal actions of violence or the evasion of
the police. But a man may understand ragging and yet be very far from
understanding religious ragging. This seeming host of theirs might
comprehend a quarrel of husband and lover or a difficulty at cards
or even escape from a pursuing tailor; but it still remained doubtful
whether he would feel the earth fail under him in that earthquake
instant when the Virgin is compared to a goddess of Mesopotamia. Even
MacIan, therefore (whose tact was far from being his strong point), felt
the necessity for some compromise in the mode of approach. At last he
said, and even then with hesitation:

"We are fighting about God; there can be nothing so important as that."

The tilted eye-glasses of the old gentleman fell abruptly from his nose,
and he thrust his aristocratic chin so far forward that his lean neck
seemed to shoot out longer like a telescope.

"About God?" he queried, in a key completely new.

"Look here!" cried Turnbull, taking his turn roughly, "I'll tell you
what it's all about. I think that there's no God. I take it that it's
nobody's business but mine--or God's, if there is one. This young
gentleman from the Highlands happens to think that it's his business. In
consequence, he first takes a walking-stick and smashes my shop; then he
takes the same walking-stick and tries to smash me. To this I naturally
object. I suggest that if it comes to that we should both have sticks.
He improves on the suggestion and proposes that we should both have
steel-pointed sticks. The police (with characteristic unreasonableness)
will not accept ei