CHAPTER III


OF ELI MOGGRIDGE AND THE NEW SPIRIT

New Zion, despite its name, was, as I have hinted, no longer new. The
fiery zeal which had once made it a living schism had long since died
out of it. Carried years before, a little blazing ember of faith, from a
flourishing hearth of Nonconformity some streets away, it had puffed and
gleamed a little space in the eloquence of the offended zealots who
carried it hotfoot that Sunday morning, but its central fire had been
poor, and for a long time no evangelistic bellows had awakened in it
even a spark.

Its original elders had long since lost heart and passed away. A
dwindling remnant of their children, from old association, just kept its
doors from actually closing, and made a mournful interruption in its
musty silence on Sundays. Life was too low to support a Wednesday
prayer-meeting, and Sunday by Sunday that life ebbed lower. New life
from the outside must come, and speedily, or it must die.

But new life was already on the way. On the town side the sad streets
round New Zion led one into a more prosperous High Street, and indeed
Zion Street itself, as it turned the corner, flamed into quite a jovial
and ruddy shop--a provision merchant's, and kept by Eli Moggridge. The
name did its owner considerable wrong, for its suggestion of puritanical
sanctimoniousness was a flat contradiction of the jovial and ruddy
personality, the huge red-whiskered laugher, for whom it stood, and of