said to bear the head of St. Paul;
and round it raged the most vital controversies about the ancient
British Church. It could hardly be denied, however, that the
controversies left Summers Minor comparatively cold.

Indeed, the things that interested Summers Minor, and the things
that did not interest him, had mystified and amused his uncle for
several hours. He exhibited the English schoolboy's startling
ignorance and startling knowledge--knowledge of some special
classification in which he can generally correct and confound his
elders. He considered himself entitled, at Hampton Court on a
holiday, to forget the very names of Cardinal Wolsey or William of
Orange; but he could hardly be dragged from some details about the
arrangement of the electric bells in the neighboring hotel. He was
solidly dazed by Westminster Abbey, which is not so unnatural since
that church became the lumber room of the larger and less successful
statuary of the eighteenth century. But he had a magic and minute
knowledge of the Westminster omnibuses, and indeed of the whole
omnibus system of London, the colors and numbers of which he knew as
a herald knows heraldry. He would cry out against a momentary
confusion between a light-green Paddington and a dark-green
Bayswater vehicle, as his uncle would at the identification of a
Greek ikon and a Roman image.

"Do you collect omnibuses like stamps?" asked his uncle. "They must
need a rather large album. Or do you keep them in your locker?"

"I keep them in my head," replied the nephew, with legitimate
firmness.

"It does you credit, I admit," replied the clergyman. "I suppose it
were vain to ask for what purpose you have learned that out of a
thousand things. There hardly seems to be a career in it, unless you
could be permanently on the pavement to prevent old ladies getting
into the wrong bus. Well, we must get out of this one, for this is
our place. I want to show you what they call St. Paul's Penny."

"Is it like St. Paul's Cathedral?" asked the youth with resignation,
as they alighted.

At the entrance their eyes were arrested by a singular figure
evidently hovering there with a similar anxiety to enter. It was
that of a dark, thin man in a long black robe rather like a cassock;
but the black cap on his head was of too strange a shape to be a
biretta. It suggested, rather, some archaic headdress of Persia or
Babylon. He had a curious black beard appearing only at the corners
of his chi