Applegate and entered into a discussion
of politics. At the end he spoke for twenty minutes, and when his speech
was over, he told himself that at last he had found something that might
take the place of love in his life. The game of politics showed itself
to him in all the exciting allurement of a passion.

A gentle mannered old clergyman, with a dream-haunted face and the
patient waiting attitude of one who had watched for miracles for fifty
years, spoke to him when the meeting was breaking up, and after a
brief conversation, invited him to address a club of workingmen on the
following Friday. Though the old clergyman had spent half a century in a
futile endeavour to persuade every man to love his neighbour as himself,
and thereby save society the worry and the expense of its criminal
code, he still hoped on with the divine far-sighted hope of the
visionary--hoped not because he saw anything particularly encouraging
in his immediate outlook, but because it was his nature to hope and he
would probably have continued to do so had Fate been so unjust as to
consign him to an Inferno. He was one of those in whom goodness is a
natural instinct, and whose existence, even in a more or less inglorious
obscurity, leavens the entire lump of humanity. Mr. Mullen, who regarded
him with the active suspicion with which he viewed all living examples
of Christian charity, spoke of him condescendingly as a "man of
impracticable ideas"--a phrase which introduced his index prohibitory of
opinions. But the old clergyman, having attained a serviceable sense
of humour, as well as a heavenly fortitude, went on quietly doing good
after the fashion in which he was made. In his impracticable way he
had solved the problem of life by an indiscriminate application of the
Golden Rule. This solution had appeared to him so simple and yet so
complete, that he had spent fifty years, with but moderate success, in
persuading others to adopt it. At the end he was not what Mr. Mullen
would have called a "shining light," in the Church, yet his bread cast
upon the waters had returned to him in quantities, which, though small
and moist, were sufficient, with stringent economy, to keep body and
soul together. One of these quantities he discerned now in the eager
young countryman, whose face accompanied him through a trying day, and
helped to brighten his self-sacrificing labours.

To Abel, driving home some hours later in his gig, the old clergyman was
prese