“Aren’t Mr. Taylor’s views very _extreme?_” she said to her husband the same evening. “I am afraid they are,” he replied. “I was quite _grieved_ at the last Diocesan Conference at the way in which he spoke. The dear old bishop had given an address on Auricular Confession; he was _forced_ to do so, you know, after what had happened, and I must say that I never felt prouder of our beloved Church.” Mr. Dixon told all the Homeric story of the conference, reciting the achievements of the champions, “deploring” this and applauding that. It seemed that Mr. Taylor had had the audacity to quote authorities which the bishop could not very well repudiate, though they were directly opposed to the “safe” Episcopal pronouncement. Mrs. Dixon of course was grieved; it was “sad” to think of a clergyman behaving so shamefully. “But you know, dear,” she proceeded, “I have been thinking about that unfortunate Taylor boy and his disappointments, and after what you’ve just told me, I am sure it’s some kind of judgment on them both. Has Mr. Taylor forgotten the vows he took at his ordination? But don’t you think, dear, I am right, and that he has been punished: ‘The sins of the fathers’?” Somehow or other Lucian divined the atmosphere of threatenings and judgments, and shrank more and more from the small society of the countryside. For his part, when he was not “mooning” in the beloved fields and woods of happy memory, he shut himself up with books, reading whatever could be found on the shelves, and amassing a store of incongruous and obsolete knowledge. Long did he linger with the men of the seventeenth century; delaying in the gay sunlit streets with Pepys, and listening to the charmed sound of the Restoration Revel; roaming by peaceful streams with Izaak Walton, and the great Catholic divines; enchanted with the portrait of Herbert the loving ascetic; awed by the mystic breath of Crashaw. Then the cavalier poets sang their gallant songs; and Herrick made Dean Prior magic ground by the holy incantation of a verse. And in the old proverbs and homely sayings of the time he found the good and beautiful English life, a time full of grace and dignity and rich merriment. He dived deeper and deeper into his books; he had taken all obsolescence to be his province; in his disgust at the stupid usual questions, “Will it pay?” “What good is it?” and so forth, he would only read what was uncouth and useless. The strange pomp and symbolism of the Cabala, with its hint of more terrible things; the Rosicrucian mysteries of Fludd, the enigmas of Vaughan, dreams of alchemists—all these were his delight. Such were his companions, with the hills and hanging woods, the brooks and lonely waterpools; books, the thoughts of books, the stirrings of imagination, all fused into one phantasy by the magic of the outland country. He held himself aloof from the walls of the fort; he was content to see the heaped mounds,