the scientist," Ernest said sweetly. "That is
why the scientist gets to places. That is why he got to America."

I shall not describe the whole evening, though it is a joy to me to
recall every moment, every detail, of those first hours of my coming to
know Ernest Everhard.

Battle royal raged, and the ministers grew red-faced and excited,
especially at the moments when Ernest called them romantic philosophers,
shadow-projectors, and similar things. And always he checked them back
to facts. "The fact, man, the irrefragable fact!" he would proclaim
triumphantly, when he had brought one of them a cropper. He bristled
with facts. He tripped them up with facts, ambuscaded them with facts,
bombarded them with broadsides of facts.

"You seem to worship at the shrine of fact," Dr. Hammerfield taunted
him.

"There is no God but Fact, and Mr. Everhard is its prophet," Dr.
Ballingford paraphrased.

Ernest smilingly acquiesced.

"I'm like the man from Texas," he said. And, on being solicited, he
explained. "You see, the man from Missouri always says, 'You've got
to show me.' But the man from Texas says, 'You've got to put it in my
hand.' From which it is apparent that he is no metaphysician."

Another time, when Ernest had just said that the metaphysical
philosophers could never stand the test of truth, Dr. Hammerfield
suddenly demanded:

"What is the test of truth, young man? Will you kindly explain what has
so long puzzled wiser heads than yours?"

"Certainly," Ernest answered. His cocksureness irritated them. "The wise
heads have puzzled so sorely over truth because they went up into the
air after it. Had they remained on the solid earth, they would have
found it easily enough--ay, they would have found that they themselves
were precisely testing truth with every practical act and thought of
their lives."

"The test, the test," Dr. Hammerfield repeated impatiently. "Never mind
the preamble. Give us that which we have sought so long--the test of
truth. Give it us, and we will be as gods."

There was an impolite and sneering scepticism in his words and manner
that secretly pleased most of them at the table, though it seemed to
bother Bishop Morehouse.

"Dr. Jordan* has stated it very clearly," Ernest said. "His test of
truth is: 'Will it work? Will you trust your life to it?'"

* A noted educator of the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries of the Christian Era. He was president
of the S