s. Here for an hour after dinner,
while darkness settles, you wander from shop to shop and put your nose
upon the glass, or you engage the lamplighter as he goes his rounds,
for any bit of news.

Once in such a town when the night brought rain, for want of other
employment, I debated divinity with a rigid parson, and until a late
hour sat in the thick curtain of his attack. It was at an inn of one
of the midland counties of England, a fine old weathered building,
called "The King's Arms." In the tap--for I thrust my thirsty head
inside--was an array of old pewter upon the walls, and two or three
prints of prize fighters of former days. But it was in the parlor the
parson engaged me. In the corner of the room there was a timid
fire--of the kind usually met in English inns--imprisoned behind a
grill that had been set up stoutly to confine a larger and rowdier
fire. My antagonist was a tall lank man of pinched ascetic face and
dark complexion, with clothes brushed to shininess, and he belonged to
a brotherhood that lived in one of the poorer parts of London along
the wharves. His sojourn at the inn was forced. For two weeks in the
year, he explained, each member was cast out of the conventual
buildings upon the world. This was done in penance, as the members of
more rigid orders in the past were flagellants for a season. So here
for a whole week had he been sitting, for the most part in rainy
weather, busied with the books that the inn afforded--advertising
booklets of the beauties of the Alps--diagrams of steamships--and
peeking out of doors for a change of sky.

It was a matter of course that he should engage me in conversation. He
was as lonesome for a chance to bark as a country dog. Presently when
I dissented from some point in his creed, he called me a heretic, and
I with gentlest satire asked him if the word yet lived. But he was not
angry, and he told me of his brotherhood. It had a branch in America,
and he bade me, if ever I met any of its priests, to convey to them
his warm regards. As for America, it was, he said, too coldly ethical,
and needed most a spiritual understanding; to which judgment I
assented. I wonder now whether the war will bring that understanding.
Maybe, unless blind hatred smothers it.

This priest was a mixture of stern and gentle qualities, and seemed to
be descended from those earlier friars that came to England in cord
and gown, and went barefoot through the cities to minister comfort a