s all very pretty, but I believe the soul must be more or
less enlightened to feel it. I've learned a few things among your people
up there in the mountains. Strange beings they are."

"It only goes to show that heredity alone won't do everything," said the
bishop, placing the tips of his fingers together and frowning
meditatively.

"Heredity? It means a lot to us over there in England."

"Yes, yes. But your old families need a little new blood in them now and
then, even if they have to come over here for it."

"For that and--your money--yes." Thryng laughed. "But these mountain
people of yours, who are they anyway?"

"Most of them are of as pure a strain of British as any in the world--as
any you will find at home. They have their heredity--and only that--from
all your classes over there, but it is from those of a hundred or more
years ago. They are the unmixed descendants of those you sent over here
for gain, drove over by tyranny, or exported for crime."

"How unmixed in your most horribly mixed and mongrel population?"

"Circumstances and environment have kept them to the pure stock, and
neglect has left them untrammelled by civilization and unaided by
education. Time and generations of ignorance have deteriorated them, and
nature alone--as you were but now admitting--has hardly served to arrest
the process by the survival of the fittest."

"Nature--yes--how do you account for it? I have been in the grandest,
most wonderful places, I venture to say, that are to be found on earth,
and among all the glory that nature can throw around a man, he is still,
if left to himself, more bestial than the beasts. He destroys and
defaces and defiles nature; he kills--for the mere sake of killing--more
than he needs; he enslaves himself to his appetites and passions,
follows them wildly, yields to them recklessly; and destroys himself and
all the beauty around him that he can reach, wantonly. Why, Bishop
Towers, sometimes I've gone out and looked up at the stars above me and
wondered which was real, they and the marvellous beauty all around me,
or the three hundred reeking humanity sleeping in the camp beneath them.
Sometimes it seemed as if only hell were real, and the camp was a bit of
it let loose to mock at heaven."

"We mustn't forget that what is transitory is not a part of God's
eternity of spirit and truth."

"Oh, yes, yes! But we do forget. And some transitory things are mighty
hard to endure, especially if the