necessity for special knowledge as to artistic or
educational matters was recognized grudgingly in Benham. Any reputable
citizen was considered capable to pass judgment on statues and pictures,
design a house or public building, and prescribe courses of study for
school-children. Since then the free-born Benhamite, little by little,
through wise legislation or public opinion, born of bitter experience,
has been robbed of these prerogatives until, not long ago, the
un-American and undemocratic proposition to take away the laying out of
the new city park from the easy going but ignorant mercies of the
so-called city forester, who had been first a plumber and later an
alderman, prevailed. An enlightened civic spirit triumphed and special
knowledge was invoked.

That was twenty-five years later. Mrs. Hallett Taylor had found herself
almost single-handed at the outset in her purpose to build the new
church on artistic lines. Or rather the case should be stated thus:
Everyone agreed that it was to be the most beautiful church in the
country, consistent with the money, and no one doubted that it would be,
especially as everyone except Mrs. Taylor felt that in confiding the
matter to the leading architect in Benham the committee would be
exercising a wise and intelligent discretion. Mr. Pierce, the individual
suggested, had never, until recently, employed the word architect in
speaking of himself, and he pronounced it, as did some of the committee,
"arshitect," shying a little at the word, as though it were caviare and
anything but American. He was a builder, practised by a brief but
rushing career in erecting houses, banks, schools, and warehouses
speedily and boldly. He had been on the spot when the new growth of
Benham began, and his handiwork was writ large all over the city. The
city was proud of him, and had, as it were, sniffed when Joel Flagg went
elsewhere for a man to build his new house. Surely, if it were necessary
to pay extra for that sort of thing, was not home talent good enough?
Yet it must be confessed that the ugly splendor of the Flagg mediaeval
castle had so far dazed the eye of Benham that its "arshitect" had felt
constrained, in order to keep up with the times, to try fancy flights of
his own. He had silenced any doubting Thomases by his latest effort, a
new school-house, rich in rampant angles and scrolls, on the brown-stone
front of which the name _Flagg School_ appeared in ambitious, distorted
hierogl