"I didn't mean that, you watch-dog. I meant to ask whether you wanted to
go to George's tea party?"

"I should like it of all things. Mr. Hazard won't hurt me, and I always
like to meet Mr. Wharton."

"Then I will ask both of them this evening for some day next week or the
week after, and will let you know," said George.

"Is he easily shocked?" asked Mr. Dudley. "Am I to do the old-school
Puritan with him, or what?"

"Stephen Hazard," replied the professor, "is as much a man of the world
as you or I. He is only thirty-five; we were at college together, took
our degrees together, went abroad at the same time, and to the same
German university. He had then more money than I, and traveled longer,
went to the East, studied a little of every thing, lived some time in
Paris, where he discovered Wharton, and at last some few years ago came
home to take a church at Cincinnati, where he made himself a power. I
thought he made a mistake in leaving there to come to St. John's, and
wrote him so. I thought if he came here he would find that he had no
regular community to deal with but just an Arab horde, and that it was
nonsense to talk of saving the souls of New Yorkers who have no souls to
be saved. But he thought it his duty to take the offer. Aunt Sarah hit
it right when she called him a Christian martyr in the amphitheater. At
college, we used to call him St. Stephen. He had this same idea that the
church was every thing, and that every thing belonged to the church.
When I told him that he was a common nuisance, and that I had to work
for him like a church-warden, he laughed as though it were a joke, and