policemen, like most other
English types, are at once snobs and poets. MacIan might possibly be a
gentleman, they felt; the editor manifestly was not. And the editor's
fine rational republican appeals to his respect for law, and his ardour
to be tried by his fellow citizens, seemed to the police quite as much
gibberish as Evan's mysticism could have done. The police were not used
to hearing principles, even the principles of their own existence.

The police magistrate, before whom they were hurried and tried, was
a Mr. Cumberland Vane, a cheerful, middle-aged gentleman, honourably
celebrated for the lightness of his sentences and the lightness of his
conversation. He occasionally worked himself up into a sort of theoretic
rage about certain particular offenders, such as the men who took
pokers to their wives, talked in a loose, sentimental way about the
desirability of flogging them, and was hopelessly bewildered by the fact
that the wives seemed even more angry with him than with their
husbands. He was a tall, spruce man, with a twist of black moustache
and incomparable morning dress. He looked like a gentleman, and yet,
somehow, like a stage gentleman.

He had often treated serious crimes against mere order or property
with a humane flippancy. Hence, about the mere breaking of an editor's
window, he was almost uproarious.

"Come, Mr. MacIan, come," he said, leaning back in his chair, "do you
generally enter you friends' houses by walking through the glass?"
(Laughter.)

"He is not my friend," said Evan, with the stolidity of a dull child.

"Not your friend, eh?" said the magistrate, sparkling. "Is he your
brother-in-law?" (Loud and prolonged laughter.)

"He is my enemy," said Evan, simply; "he is the enemy of God."

Mr. Vane shifted sharply in his seat, dropping the eye-glass out of his
eye in a momentary and not unmanly embarrassment.

"You mustn't talk like that here," he said, roughly, and in a kind of
hurry, "that has nothing to do with us."

Evan opened his great, blue eyes; "God," he began.

"Be quiet," said the magistrate, angrily, "it is most undesirable that
things of that sort should be spoken about--a--in public, and in an
ordinary Court of Justice. Religion is--a--too personal a matter to be
mentioned in such a place."

"Is it?" answered the Highlander, "then what did those policemen swear
by just now?"

"That is no parallel," answered Vane, rather irritably; "of course there
is a form of o