It was about this time that Billy also began to feel that Father Francis was a friend, though he still avoided church and schools, just as he had learnt to dodge the school attendance officer and Policeman X. In summer weather he had spent most of his Sundays in the Green Park which was close at hand, or watching the wild-fowl on the ornamental water of St James’s, but about noonday on these winter Sundays, he might generally be found at the Cranks’ Corner in Hyde Park, listening with more or less wondering looks to the wild and whirling words of the competing speakers. Here, on the battleground won for free speech in many a contest with authority, the cranks let off the steam according to the measure of their crankiness. The pitches were so close together that the groups of listeners almost blended, and an auditor quick of hearing had presented to him a sort of mosaic of oratory that was, to say the least, bewildering. One speaker would be raving against the worthlessness and wickedness of vaccination, while another volleyed and thundered against the Education Act. But, mostly, the changes were rung on Religion, Atheism, and Socialism. Each cult had its champion every Sunday. There was a crank who had his own peculiar interpretation of the Book of Revelation, undertaking to tell his hearers what was signified by the beasts with many eyes, the vials of wrath, and the sealing of the servants of the Lord. He knew who were the horned kings of the Apocalypse, or, at least, some of them,--the Kaiser, the Czar, and the Mikado. He knew, or thought he did, all about the battle of Armageddon, that terrible conflict, transcending in its terrors every bloody war that men had waged on earth. The war of Michael and his angels against the dragon and his angels, “who prevailed not, neither was their place found any more in heaven. And the great dragon was cast out, that old serpent called the devil and Satan which deceiveth the whole world.” “And where was the great dragon sent?” cried the speaker, “and where had he been at work ever since? ’Woe to the inhabitants of the earth and of the sea: for the devil is come down unto you, having great wrath, because he knoweth that he hath but a short time.’ Perhaps they didn’t think it was a short time,” said the speaker, who could be shrewd and logical at times, “but time must not be measured by the little span of a man’s earthly life. What was a thousand years in the boundless depths of eternity? And why need there be so much talk about eternity when time itself was so immeasurable--the time of the geological periods, the time of the solar system,--unthinkable, like the distances from star to star.