ontrary
to all the rules of religion. I thought faith was the ticket."

By this answer Mr. Lavender was so impressed that he sat for a moment in
silence, with his eyebrow working up and down.

"Sir," he said at last, "you have given me a new thought. If you are
right, to disbelieve in you and the acts which you perform, or rather the
editions which you issue, is blasphemy."

"I should think so," said the Personage, emitting a long whiff of smoke.
Hadn't that ever occurred to you before?"

"No," replied Mr. Lavender, naively, "for I have never yet disbelieved
anything in those journals."

The Personage coughed heartily.

"I have always regarded them," went on Mr. Lavender, "as I myself should
wish to be regarded, 'without fear and without reproach.' For that is,
as I understand it, the principle on which a gentleman must live, ever
believing of others what he would wish believed of himself. With the
exception of Germans," he added hastily.

"Naturally," returned the Personage. "And I'll defy you to find anything
in them which disagrees with that formula. Everything they print refers
to Germans if not directly then obliquely. Germans are the 'idee fixe',
and without an 'idee fixe', as you know, there's no such thing as
religion. Do you get me?"

"Yes, indeed," cried Mr. Lavender, enthused, for the whole matter now
seemed to him to fall into coherence, and, what was more, to coincide
with his preconceptions, so that he had no longer any doubts. "You, sir
--the Unseen Power--are but the crystallized embodiment of the national
sentiment in time of war; in serving you, and fulfilling the ideas which
you concrete in your journals, we public men are servants of the general
animus, which in its turn serves the blind and burning instinct of
justice. This is eminently satisfactory to me, who would wish no better
fate than to be a humble lackey in that house." He had no sooner,
however, spoken those words than Joe Petty's remarks about Public Opinion
came back to him, and he added: "But are you really the general animus,
or are you only the animus of Mayors, that is the question?"

The personage seemed to follow this thought with difficulty. "What's
that?" he said.

Mr. Lavender ran his hands through his hair.

"And turns," he said, "on what is the unit of national feeling and
intelligence? Is it or is it not a Mayor?"

The Personage smiled. "Well, what do you think?" he said. "Haven't you
ever heard them after dinne