pened, and man been obliged
to stand upon a pedestal and be worshiped.

Hammond laughed, but declared that I was all wrong. Man's tendency to
worship woman, while naturally blending with his passional attraction
towards her, did not spring from the instinct of sex, but from the
instinct of race,--a far deeper and generally unrecognized impulse.
Even though woman should become some day the dominant sex, man need
suffer no apprehension of being worshiped. His modesty would be
respected.

Some time later, when we had cozily established ourselves before a
sea-coal fire in Hammond's quarters, with divers creature comforts at
hand for one of our usual symposiums, the subject came up again; and
under conditions so favorable to discursiveness our talk took a wide
range.

"By the way," said I, apropos of some remark he had made, "talking about
the adoration of woman, did not that crack-brained Frenchman, Auguste
Comte, propose something of the sort as a feature of his 'Religion of
Humanity'?"

Hammond nodded.

"I wonder," I said, "whether that feature of his scheme was ever
actually practiced by his followers. I should like to get a chance to
ask a Positivist about that, if indeed there are any in America."

Hammond smoked in silence for some time, and finally said, quietly,
"Possibly I might tell you something about it myself."

"Hello!" I exclaimed. "How long since you have been a Positivist?"

"About twenty-five years," was the matter-of-fact reply.

"A Positivist of twenty-five years' standing," I ejaculated, "and never
told of it! Why have you hid your light under a bushel all this while?"

"I said that it was twenty-five years since I had been a Positivist,"
replied Hammond; "as long, in fact, as it is since I have been a
sophomore. Both experiences belonged to the same year of my college
course, and, perhaps you may infer, to the same stage of intellectual
development. For about six months at that time I was as ardent a
convert, I fancy, as the Religion of Humanity ever had."

"I thought you had told me all about yourself long ago," I said. "How
is it that you have kept so mum about this experience? I should fancy it
must have been a decidedly odd one."

"It was a very odd one," replied Hammond,--"the strangest passage, on
the whole, I think, in my life. I have never spoken of it, because it is
one of those emotional experiences which no man likes to relate unless
he is sure of being understood. To tell it