keeping. St. John came in, and Christ and the schoolmaster--who had
conducted the choir--and the thick tenor and some supers, and I
congratulated them one and all with a gloomy sense of dishonesty.
When, as evening fell, I walked home with St. John, I was gloomily
glad to find the valley shrouded in mist and a starless heaven sagging
over a blank earth. It seemed an endless uphill drag to my lodging,
and though my bedroom was unexpectedly dainty, and a dear old
woman--St. John's mother--metaphorically tucked me in, I slept ill
that night. Formless dreams tortured me with impalpable tragedies and
apprehensions of horror. In the morning--after a cold sponging--the
oppression lifted a little from my spirit, though the weather still
seemed rather gray. St. John had already gone off to his field-work,
his mother told me. She was so lovely, and the room in which I ate
breakfast so neat and demure with its whitewashed walls--pure and
stainless like country snow--that I managed to swallow everything but
the coffee. O that coffee! I had to nibble at a bit of chocolate I
carried to get the taste of it out of my mouth. I tried hard not to
let the blues get the upper hand again. I filled my pipe and pulled
out my sketch-book. My notes of yesterday seemed so faint, and the
morning to be growing so dark, that I could scarcely see them. I
thought I would go and sit on the little bench outside. As I was
sauntering through the doorway, my head bending broodingly over the
sketch-book, I caught sight out of the corner of my eye of a little
white match-stand fixed up on the wall. Mechanically I put out my left
hand to take a light for my pipe. A queer, cold wetness in my fingers
and a little splash woke me to the sense of some odd mistake, and in
another instant I realized with horror that I had dipped my fingers
into holy water and splashed it over that neat, demure, spotless,
whitewashed wall."

I could not help smiling. "Ah, I know; one of those porcelain things
with a crucified Saviour over a little font. Fancy taking heaven for
brimstone!"

"It didn't seem the least bit funny at the time. I just felt awful.
What would the dear old woman say to this profanation? Why the dickens
did people have whitewashed walls on which sacrilegious stains were
luridly visible? I looked up and down the hall like Moses when he slew
that Egyptian, trembling lest the old woman should come in. How could
I make her understand I was so ignorant of Christi