ific truth.
In these modern days, a clergyman should be fully abreast of scientific
thought. Best keep on with his chemistry. It might be useful to him,
later on. Even eternal brimstone was susceptible of analysis.

Then, an instant later, the old professor could have bitten out his
tongue for his unholy jest. His penitence was in no wise lessened by
the quality of Scott's answering laugh. Best leave those fellows to
their ministerial sackcloth, without questioning the quality of the
flax from which it was spun. A man of Scott Brenton's calibre would do
no harm by his preaching. What was the sense of seeking to upset any
orthodox beliefs he might happen to have inherited? Besides, as long as
Scott kept up his sciences, he was reasonably sure of keeping up his
common sense and, what was a long way more important, his perspective
and his sense of fun.

Despite his disappointed resolutions to dismiss the boy from his mind,
the old professor, going his chemical way, worried about Scott. It
seemed to him, according to his bald phrasing, to be a cruel waste of
good material to make a parson out of what might have been a great
explorer, for, to Professor Mansfield's mind, the incomplete and
lengthening list of elements was just as reasonable a field for
exploration as was the Antarctic Continent, or Darkest Africa. The
results, indeed, of such exploration were bound to be a great deal the
more useful. The professor worried. In time, he laid his worries on the
dinner table before Reed Opdyke whose father had been a classmate of
his own.

"It's an awful shame about young Brenton," he observed, when he and
Opdyke and the tobacco had been left to themselves.

"What about him?" Opdyke questioned carelessly, as he picked up a
match.

"That he has talents of his own, and a conscience that belongs to his
mother. I believe in mothers, Reed; yours is a wonderful woman. But, in
this case, I doubt the wonder, and I deplore the way she keeps her
thumb on Brenton."

"You think she does?"

"I know it. Her confounded theories of sanctity are putting a binding
around all his brain, a tight binding that is going to shrink and cause
a pucker. Brenton has a first-class scientific mind, granted it gets
the training. Left to himself and the divinity school, he'll turn into
a perfect ass as preacher."

Opdyke shook his head.

"Nothing so possible as that, I'm afraid," he contradicted. "He'll just
settle down on his heels, and shuffle al