Devastating was the wrath of Montrose Clark upon receipt of Judge Dana’s report, wholly unexpurgated. He fumed, first redly, then purply, as if some strange chemical reaction were taking place inside him; and from the exhalations of that turmoil, there crystallized a most unwise decision. Montrose Clark decided upon reprisals with his enemy’s own weapon. He had Garson write several personal attacks upon Jeremy Robson, and intimidated Farley into publishing them in The Record, at special advertising rates, a procedure decidedly painful to Farley’s views of professional ethics and journalistic fellowship. Jeremy retorted with a series of hasty but rather brilliant imaginary interviews with one “President Puff,” which all but drove the subject of them into an apoplexy, and were a source of joy to the ungodly, albeit discreetly subdued as to expression, for the P.-U. head was a man of power in many directions. At this point the Church rushed into the breach in the person of the Reverend Mr. Merserole, Montrose Clark’s rector, and the benefidary of a five thousand dollar gift to the fund of the Nicklin Avenue Church only a week previous. Both the high-minded Mr. Clark and the high-church rector would have been profoundly and quite honestly shocked at the suggestion that there was the faintest element of financial influence (in impious circles called “graft”) in what followed. But the reverend gentleman preached an able and severe sermon upon the topic “Poisoned Pens,” in which a certain type of reckless, demagogic, passion-inciting, self-seeking, conscienceless journalism was lifted up to public reprobation in a pillar of fiery invective. The Guardian violated all precedent by publishing the livelier portions of the sermon under the caption, “Whom can the Reverend Gentleman Mean?” and followed this up with a report on the Clark contribution, paralleled with further excerpts from the more spiritual and lofty portions of the sermon, headed with the text, “Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.” The Reverend Mr. Merserole was pained and annoyed for the remainder of the week by a steady influx of marked copies of The Guardian. He was stimulated to a holy but helpless wrath by the subsequent discovery that he, the impeccable pastor of the fashionable Nicklin Avenue Church, had been impiously dubbed “the Nickle-in-the-Slot rector.” This ribaldry he ascribed to Jeremy Robson’s unprofessional wit, wherein he was wrong. As a matter of fact, it was a flash from the quaint mind of Eli Wade, the Boot & Shoe Surgeon. But Jeremy had earned another implacable enemy.