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 stupidity and ignorance of some despot or augur. The sky-pilot has over-ridden the astronomer in his own department. And the fact must be faced, that if exact science and religion are to clash, it will be religion that goes to the wall.’

‘Boldly said, for a sky-pilot!’ observed his niece.

‘However,’ resumed Mr Bristley, unheeding the interruption, ‘I must at the same time say for myself personally, that I do like to have one thing or another; I hate what’s neither fish, flesh, fowl, nor good red herring. Don’t be off with the old love, say I, before you’re on with the new. So long as we do keep up the Christian era at all—and your convention, Letitia, may not find the world prepared to throw it over for some years yet—why did we go and spoil the poetical associations and upset the quietness of life by a change of style in the year 1752, just because some other countries had been fools enough to humour the fads of a superstitious old pope who wanted to make Easter fit in with some lunatic craze or other?’

‘That is not respectful to Infallibility, Mr Bristley,’ observed Friga.

‘I’ll tell you what,’ returned the vicar, who was not in a reverential mood, ‘if Infallibility doesn’t clear out of my way, when my time comes to join the glorious company whence it claims its titles, I'll make it see more stars than ever the astronomers did whose intelligence it seems to have obfuscated. But seriously, Lady Friga, don’t you see that the change from the old style of a hundred odd years back to the current style of to-day has been a piece of botch tinkering and patching which has spoilt everything and mended nothing? Granted that the solstice may be brought into a nearer harmony with the fiction of Christmas and the purely arbitrary date of New Year’s Day—’

‘Yes, I suppose the new style is rather truer to the sun,’ put in Friga.