He was a splendid inspiration to belief in God and man.
Nor was he of the type Pharasaic--the type to profess love for its kind, yet stay scrupulously aloof from the vanquished and court only the victors.

Indeed, this was not so.
In the full tide of his progress--it was indeed a progress and never a mere walk--he would stop to address a few words of simple cheer to the aged female mendicant--perhaps to make a joke with her--some pleasantry not unbefitting his station, his mien denoting a tender chivalry which has been agreeably subdued though not impaired by the experience inevitable to a man of the world.

When he dropped the coin into the withered palm, he did it with a certain lingering hurriedness, as one frankly unable to repress a human weakness, though nervously striving to have it over quickly and by stealth.
Young Rigby Reeves, generalising, as it later appeared, from inadequate data, swore once that the rector of St.Antipas kept always an eye ahead for the female mendicant in the tattered shawl and the bonnet of inferior modishness; that, if the Avenue was crowded enough to make it seem worth while, he would even cross from one side to the other for the sake of speaking to her publicly.
While the fact so declared may have been a fact, the young man's corollary that the rector of St.Antipas sought this experience for the sake of its mere publicity came from a prejudice which closer acquaintance with Dr.Linford happily dissolved from his mind.

As reasonably might he have averred, as did another cynic, that the rector of St.Antipas was actuated by the instincts of a mountebank when he selected his evening papers each day--deliberately and with kind words--from the stock of a newswoman at a certain conspicuous and ever-crowded crossing.

As reasonable was the imputation of this other cynic, that in greeting friends upon the thronged avenue, the rector never failed to use some word or phrase that would identify him to those passing, giving the person addressed an unpleasant sense of being placed in a lime-light, yet reducing him to an insignificance just this side the line of obliteration.
"You say, 'Ah, Doctor!' and shake hands, you know," said this hypercritical observer, "and, ten to one, he says something about St.
Antipas directly, you know, or--'Tell him to call on Dr.Linford at the rectory adjoining St.Antipas--I'm always there at eleven,' or 'Yes, quite true, the bishop said to me, "My dear Linford, we depend on you in this matter,"' or telling how Mrs.General Somebody-Something, you know--I never could remember names--took him down dreadfully by calling him the most dangerously fascinating man in New York.