“If I had had a little time to think of this,” protested Fenton. “My committee are, to a man, opposed to this temperance movement, and our relation to Bayard is, of course,--you must see, Professor,--peculiar! But perhaps”-- “Oh, Tompkinton and I can manage,” replied the Professor, not without a twinkle in his deep eyes. “I don’t suppose the First Church has ever heard of us, but we will do our humble best.” Now, as the event fell out, the Professor and Tompkinton changed their programme a little; and when the time came to do Bayard this fraternal service,--the first of its kind ever offered to him by the clergymen of the denomination in which he was reared,--the Professor drove across the Cape in the hot sun, ten miles, to fill the Reverend Mr. Tompkinton’s little, country pulpit, and Tompkinton took the morning service for his classmate. In the evening the Professor of Theology from Cesarea Seminary occupied the desk of the heretic preacher in Windover town hall. The hall was thronged. George Fenton preached to yawning pews; for the First Church, out of sheer, unsanctified curiosity, lurched over, and sixty of them went to hear the distinguished Professor. Bayard’s own people were present in the usual summer evening force and character. The Professor of Theology looked uncomfortably at the massed and growing audience. He was sixty-eight years old, and in all his scholarly and Christian life he had never stood before an audience like this. He opened his manuscript sermon,--he had selected a doctrinal sermon upon the Nature of the Trinity,--and began to read it with his own distinguished manner. The audience, restrained at first by the mere effect of good elocution and a cultivated voice, were respectful for awhile; they listened hopefully; then perplexedly; then dully. Sentence after sentence, polished, and sound as the foundations of Galilee or Damascus Hall, fell softly from the lips of the Cesarea Professor upon the ears of the Windover fishermen. Doctrine upon doctrine attacked them, and they knew it not. Proof-text upon proof-text bombarded them in vain. The Professor saw the faces of his audience lengthen and fall; across the rude, red brows of the foreign sailors wonder flitted; then confusion; then dismay. Drunkards and reformed men and wretched girls, and the homeless, wretched people of a seaport town, stood packed in rows before the Professor of Theology, and gaped upon him. Restlessness struck them, and began to run from man to man. “Shut up there!” whispered Job Slip, punching a big Swede. “Be quiet, can’t ye, for common manners! You’ll disgrace Mr. Bayard!” “Be civil to the old cove, for the parson’s sake!” commanded Captain Hap, hitting a Finn, and stepping on the toes of a Windover seiner, who had presumed to snicker. “Why don’t he talk English then?” protested the fisherman.