it involved more. McCrae looked as if he knew--knew many things that
he deemed it necessary for the new rector to find out by experience.

But he was a difficult man to talk to.

If the truth be told, the more Hodder became absorbed in these activities
of the parish house, the greater grew his perplexity, the more acute his
feeling of incompleteness; or rather, his sense that the principle was
somehow fundamentally at fault. Out of the waters of the proletariat
they fished, assiduously and benignly, but at random, strange specimens!
brought them, as it were, blinking to the light, and held them by sheer
struggling. And sometimes, when they slipped away, dived after them.
The young curate, Mr. Tompkinson, for the most part did the diving; or,
in scriptural language, the searching after the lost sheep.

The results accomplished seemed indeed, as Mr. Parr had remarked,
strangely disproportionate to the efforts, for they laboured abundantly.
The Italian mothers appeared stolidly appreciative of the altruism of
Miss Ramsay, who taught the kindergarten, in taking their charges off
their hands for three hours of a morning, and the same might be said of
the Jews and Germans and Russians. The newsboys enjoyed the gymnasium
and reading-rooms: some of them were drafted into the choir, yet the
singing of Te Deums failed somehow to accomplish the miracle of
regeneration. The boys, as a rule, were happier, no doubt; the new
environments not wholly without results. But the rector was an idealist.

He strove hard to become their friend, and that of the men; to win their
confidence, and with a considerable measure of success. On more than one
occasion he threw aside his clerical coat and put on boxing-gloves, and
he gave a series of lectures, with lantern slides, collected during the
six months he had once spent in Europe. The Irish-Americans and the
Germans were the readiest to respond, and these were for the most part
young workingmen and youths by no means destitute. When they were out
of a place, he would often run across them in the reading-room or sitting
among the lockers beside the gymnasium, and they would rise and talk to
him cordially and even familiarly about their affairs. They liked and
trusted him--on a tacit condition. There was a boundary he might not
cross. And the existence of that boundary did not seem to trouble
McCrae.

One night as he stood with his assistant in the hall after the men had
gone, Hodder could