of the river one Eight's week. The oar looked as if it were waiting to be properly hung on the wall as a decorative trophy, which indeed it was. But it had been waiting for seven years. The priest never had time to nail it up. He did not despise comfort or decoration, pretend to a pose of rigidness; he simply hadn't the time for it himself. That was all. He was always promising himself to put up — for example — a pair of crimson curtains a sister had sent him months back. But whenever he really determined to get them out and hang them, some sudden call came and he had to rush out and save a soul.
Father Ripon looked ill and worn. A pamphlet, a long, thin book bound in blue paper, with the Royal Arms on the top of the folio, lay upon the table. It was the report of the Committee of Investigation, and the whole world was ringing with it.
The report had now appeared for two days.
The priest took up The Tower, a weekly paper, the official organ, not of the pious Evangelical party within the Church, but of the ultra-Protestant.
His hand shook with anger and disgust as he read, for the third time, the leading article printed in large type, with wider spaces than usual between the lines:
"We have hitherto refrained from any comment on the marvellous discovery in Jerusalem, being content simply to record the progress of the investigations, which have at last satisfied us that a genuine discovery has been made.
"In the daily special issues of the organs of the sacerdotal party we find much more freedom of expression. They have run the whole gamut — Disbelief, Doubt, Desolation, Detraction, Demoralisation, and Dismay. Rome and Ritualism have received a shock which de-
