that a public man against whom a charge like this is hurled is presumed to be guilty until he proves himself innocent."
"That is your attitude?" inquired Hampstead coldly.
"Oh, by no means," protested the physician.
"It is his attitude all the same," commented the minister to himself, somewhat bitterly, as he descended from the train at the station nearest his home.
"How does he take it?" asked one sage citizen, crowding into the vacant seat beside the physician, while a second leaned over from behind to hear the answer.
"Very much worried," replied the doctor, as gravely and as oracularly as he would have pronounced upon another man's patient. "Very much worried!"
"Would you believe," the physician inquired presently of the first citizen, with a hesitating and extremely confidential air, "would you believe that Doctor Hampstead would say 'hell'—outside of a sermon, I mean?"
"No," answered the man addressed, "I would not," and his eyebrows were lifted, while his whole face expressed surprise, shock, and a desire for confirmation.
"Well," concluded the doctor enigmatically, "neither would I." And that was all Doctor Mann did say upon the subject, yet citizen number one, while casting the dice with citizen number two at the Tobacco Emporium on the corner next the railroad station to see which should pay for their after-dinner smoke, communicated in confidence that the Reverend Hampstead had, in the stress of his emotion, uttered an oath; in fact, and to be specific, had said that his persecutors, all and singular, and this actress woman in particular, could go to hell!
This conference between citizen one and two may have been overheard. An inference that it was so overheard might have been drawn from the columns of The Sentinel, which next morning concluded its story of the re-
