e dearly bought to one who had been trained to
the arms of thought, and whose noble privilege it might have been to live
in perpetual warfare for the advancing truth which the next generation
will claim as the legacy of the present.

The Reverend Mr. Fairweather was getting careless about his sermons. He
must wait the fitting moment to declare himself; and in the mean time he
was preaching to heretics. It did not matter much what he preached,
under such circumstances. He pulled out two old yellow sermons from a
heap of such, and began looking over that for the forenoon. Naturally
enough, he fell asleep over it, and, sleeping, he began to dream.

He dreamed that he was under the high arches of an old cathedral, amidst
a throng of worshippers. The light streamed in through vast windows,
dark with the purple robes of royal saints, or blazing with yellow
glories around the heads of earthly martyrs and heavenly messengers. The
billows of the great organ roared among the clustered columns, as the sea
breaks amidst the basaltic pillars which crowd the stormy cavern of the
Hebrides. The voice of the alternate choirs of singing boys swung back
and forward, as the silver censer swung in the hands of the white-robed
children. The sweet cloud of incense rose in soft, fleecy mists, full of
penetrating suggestions of the East and its perfumed altars. The knees
of twenty generations had worn the pavement; their feet had hollowed the
steps; their shoulders had smoothed the columns. Dead bishops and abbots
lay under the marble of the floor in their crumbled vestments; dead
warriors, in rusted armor, were stretched beneath their sculptured
effigies. And all at once all the buried multitudes who had ever
worshipped there came thronging in through the aisles. They choked every
space, they swarmed into all the chapels, they hung in clusters over the
parapets of the galleries, they clung to the images in every niche, and
still the vast throng kept flowing and flowing in, until the living were
lost in the rush of the returning dead who had reclaimed their own.
Then, as his dream became more fantastic, the huge cathedral itself
seemed to change into the wreck of some mighty antediluvian vertebrate;
its flying-buttresses arched round like ribs, its piers shaped themselves
into limbs, and the sound of the organ-blast changed to the wind
whistling through its thousand-jointed skeleton.

And presently the sound lulled, and softened and