I couldn't very well ask his name by that time, it would have been too absurd. I trusted to Roger to get me out of that difficulty, for he knew Roger, evidently, and me too, though not very well, I judged. He certainly wasn't in my college class, for it would have come up, I was sure, in our talk. Not that we talked much. It was a stuffy, disagreeable ride, and I was alternately vexed with Roger and worried about him. In a hopelessly foolish manner I connected the razors and the parson, too closely for any reasonable inference in regard to the latter. I knew the connection was ridiculous but it was persistent, and as I had lost all hope of placing the man sitting beside me, my mind was altogether in a horrid muddle. Once he asked me abruptly if Roger were an Episcopalian. "No," I answered, "he--his people are Unitarians." "I'm a Congregationalist, as you know, of course," he went on, "but if it makes no more difference to Roger than it will to me, there'll be no trouble." "Anyone would suppose he was going to christen Roger," I thought disgustedly and returned to my troublesome thoughts, replying absently that it would be all right, of course. We changed cars at S---- and got into a queer little local train filled with young village roughs, whose noisy horseplay annoyed me exceedingly. My mysterious parson, however, was deeply interested in them and related incident after incident in proof of what could be accomplished with this offensive part of the rural population by social organisation under competent direction. He even got out an old letter and proved to me on the back of it, with a stub of a pencil, what a pitiful outlay in money was sufficient to start a practical boys' club, including the rent of a second-hand piano, to be purchased ultimately on the instalment plan. In the midst of this lecture (it was no less) I fell asleep, uncomfortably and rudely, and it was he who shook me awake at last and carried the bag out of the close car. CHAPTER VIII THE MISTS OF EDEN The station lights flared pale in the coming dawn. Behind the barred window of the ticket-office, which contained, as its bright lamp showed, a tumbled cot bed and a dilapidated arm-chair, a tousled young man sat playing Patience in his nightshirt on the telegraph table. We battered on his window, and to our amazement he nodded casually and entirely without surprise at us, reached into a corner of his littered room, grasped a pair of oars, and, pushing up the window, poked them out at us between the bars. "Mr. Jerrolds, I guess," he remarked. "Mr. Bradley's left the boat for you at the foot of the dock, little ways across the track there. It's kind of a blue boat. You just sight the two reefs and the bell buoy and when you're just opposite of the buoy, turn about and make for the shore. There's a white pole where you land." "Have you been sitting up--" I began, but he cut me short impatiently.