lerably
lame, "it means something different; I cannot tell what."

"It means the difference between godly fear and civil ease, between a
house of prayer and one of no prayer. It spells the moral change
which came over this University when religion, the spring and source
of collegiate life, was discarded. The cloisters behind you were
built for men who walked with God."

"But why," objected Taffy, plucking up courage, "couldn't they do
that in the sunlight?"

Velvet-cap opened his mouth. The boy felt he was going to be
denounced; when a merry laugh from the old clergyman averted the
storm.

"Be content," he said to his companion; "we are Gothic enough in
Oxford nowadays. And the lad is right too. There was hope even for
eighteenth-century Magdalen while its buildings looked on sunlight
and on that tower. You and the rest of us lay too much stress on
prayer. The lesson of that tower (with all deference to your amazing
discernment and equally amazing whims) is not prayer, but praise.
And when all men unite to worship God, it'll be praise, not prayer,
that brings them together.

"'Praise is devotion fit for noble minds,
The differing world's agreeing sacrifice.'"

"Oh, if you're going to fling quotations from a tapster's son at my
head. . . . Let me see . . . how does it go on? . . . Where--
something or other--different faiths--

"'Where Heaven divided faiths united finds. . . .'"

And in a moment the pair were in hot pursuit after the quotation,
tripping each other up like two schoolboys at a game. Taffy never
forgot the final stanza, the last line of which they recovered
exactly in the middle of the street, Velvet-cap standing between two
tram-lines, right in the path of an advancing car, while he
declaimed--

"'By penitence when we ourselves forsake,
'Tis but in wise design on piteous Heaven;
In praise--'"

(The gesture was magnificent)

"'In praise we nobly give what God may take,
And are without a beggar's blush forgiven.'

"--Confound these trams!"

The old clergyman shook hands with Taffy in some haste. "And when
you reach home give my respects to your father. Stay, you don't know
my name. Here is my card, or you'll forget it."

"Mine, too," said Velvet-cap.

Taffy stood staring after them as they walked off down the lane which
skirts the Botanical Gardens. The names on the two cards were famous
ones, as even he knew. He walked back t