long time he had clung to the institution he had been taught to believe
was the rock of ages, the Congregational Church, finally to abandon it;
even that assuming a form fantastic and unreal, as embodied in the
edifice three blocks distant from Fillmore Street which he had attended
for a brief time, some ten years before, after his arrival in Hampton.
The building, indeed, was symbolic of a decadent and bewildered
Puritanism in its pathetic attempt to keep abreast with the age, to
compromise with anarchy, merely achieving a nondescript medley of
rounded, knob-like towers covered with mulberry-stained shingles. And the
minister was sensational and dramatic. He looked like an actor, he
aroused in Edward Bumpus an inherent prejudice that condemned the stage.
Half a block from this tabernacle stood a Roman Catholic Church,
prosperous, brazen, serene, flaunting an eternal permanence amidst the
chaos which had succeeded permanence!

There were, to be sure, other Protestant churches where Edward Bumpus and
his wife might have gone. One in particular, which he passed on his way
to the mill, with its terraced steeple and classic facade, preserved all
the outward semblance of the old Order that once had seemed so enduring
and secure. He hesitated to join the decorous and dwindling
congregation,--the remains of a social stratum from which he had been
pried loose; and--more irony--this street, called Warren, of arching elms
and white-gabled houses, was now the abiding place of those prosperous
Irish who had moved thither from the tenements and ruled the city.

On just such a street in the once thriving New England village of Dolton
had Edward been born. In Dolton Bumpus was once a name of names, rooted
there since the seventeenth century, and if you had cared to listen he
would have told you, in a dialect precise but colloquial, the history of
a family that by right of priority and service should have been destined