“I wonder,” I said, “whether that feature of his scheme was ever actually practiced by his followers. I should like to get a chance to ask a Positivist about that, if indeed there are any in America.” Hammond smoked in silence for some time, and finally said, quietly, “Possibly I might tell you something about it myself.” “Hello!” I exclaimed. “How long since you have been a Positivist?” “About twenty-five years,” was the matter-of-fact reply. “A Positivist of twenty-five years’ standing,” I ejaculated, “and never told of it! Why have you hid your light under a bushel all this while?” “I said that it was twenty-five years since I had been a Positivist,” replied Hammond; “as long, in fact, as it is since I have been a sophomore. Both experiences belonged to the same year of my college course, and, perhaps you may infer, to the same stage of intellectual development. For about six months at that time I was as ardent a convert, I fancy, as the Religion of Humanity ever had.” “I thought you had told me all about yourself long ago,” I said. “How is it that you have kept so mum about this experience? I should fancy it must have been a decidedly odd one.” “It was a very odd one,” replied Hammond,--“the strangest passage, on the whole, I think, in my life. I have never spoken of it, because it is one of those emotional experiences which no man likes to relate unless he is sure of being understood. To tell it to most men would be casting pearls before swine. I have always meant to tell you when a suitable opportunity came up.” “You know,” he said, when I had signified my eagerness to hear, “that I graduated at Leroy College. It was a little one-horse institution, but blue as a whetstone in its orthodoxy; and with my father, who was a clergyman of a very strait sect and staid views, that fact covered a multitude of shortcomings. I was nineteen when I entered, and consequently twenty when, at the beginning of sophomore year, I came under the charge of Professor Régnier. He was a Frenchman, but spoke English with perfect ease and precision and a very slight accent. At the time I knew him, he was probably sixty. His hair was quite gray, but his mustache and imperial were still dark. It was rumored among the students that he had left his native land for political reasons, having played for too high stakes at the national game of revolution. True or not, the report naturally heightened the interest which his personality had for us.