u soon.'

"Harry turned pale.

"'You look sick, old man,' I said.

"'I'm not feeling very well,' said he, 'and I think I shall excuse
myself and go home.'

"There was danger of a scene, but he got away unharmed. By and by the
lionhearted deacon came out of his room, asked severely for 'young
Delance,' wandered through the crowd, answered indignantly a few
inquiries about his health, and returned to his lair.

"I saw that the Deacon was mad. New New England had imprudently bumped
into old New England, and it was too soon to estimate the damage."

The Honorable Socrates Potter laughed as he filled his pipe, and
resumed with an attitude of ease and comfort;

"I'm a bit of a Puritan myself, although I understood Harry better
than did the Deacon. The young people have been captured by the
frankness of the Latin races. They call it emancipation. Travel and
the higher education have opened the storage vats of foreign
degeneracy and piped them into our land. Certain young men who have
been 'finished' abroad, where they filled their souls with Latin
lewdness, have turned it into fiction and a source of profit. Women
buy their books and rush through them, and only touch the low places.
There they lie entranced, thick as autumnal leaves that strew the
brooks in Vallombrosa. Like the women in the sack of Ismail, they sit
them down and watch for the adultery to begin.

"The imagination of the old world seems to have gone wild--Oscar
Wilde! How the Oscars have thriven there since the first of them went
to jail!--a degenerate dynasty!--hiding the stench of spiritual rot
with the perfume of faultless rhetoric, speaking the unspeakable with
the tongues of angels and of prophets! And mostly, my boy, they have
thriven on the dollars of American women under the leadership of
modern culture. And, you know, the maiden follows mama. She is an
apologist of sublime lewdness, of emancipated human caninity. Now I am
no prude. I can stand a fairly strong touch of human nature. I can
even put up with a good deal of the frankness of the cat and dog. But
the frankness of some modern authors makes me sorry that Adam was a
common ancestor of theirs and mine. It's a disgrace to Adam and the
whole human brotherhood. We sons of the Puritans ought to get busy in
the old cause. Noah had the good sense to keep the animals and the
people apart, and that's what we've always stood for."

VIII

IN WHICH SOCRATES ATTACKS THE HELMET AND THE BATT