walk, spinning the sunshade on her shoulder.

Though the parsonage was only three blocks away, the young minister had
time to think about a good many things before he reached home.

First of all, he had to revise in part the arrangement of his notions
about the Irish. Save for an occasional isolated and taciturn figure
among the nomadic portion of the hired help in the farm country, Theron
had scarcely ever spoken to a person of this curiously alien race
before. He remembered now that there had been some dozen or more Irish
families in Tyre, quartered in the outskirts among the brickyards,
but he had never come in contact with any of them, or given to their
existence even a passing thought. So far as personal acquaintance went,
the Irish had been to him only a name.

But what a sinister and repellent name! His views on this general
subject were merely those common to his communion and his environment.
He took it for granted, for example, that in the large cities most of
the poverty and all the drunkenness, crime, and political corruption
were due to the perverse qualities of this foreign people--qualities
accentuated and emphasized in every evil direction by the baleful
influence of a false and idolatrous religion. It is hardly too much to
say that he had never encountered a dissenting opinion on this point.
His boyhood had been spent in those bitter days when social, political,
and blood prejudices were fused at white heat in the public crucible
together. When he went to the Church Seminary, it was a matter of course
that every member of the faculty was a Republican, and that every one of
his classmates had come from a Republican household. When, later on, he
entered the ministry, the rule was still incredulous of exceptions. One
might as well have looked in the Nedahma Conference for a divergence