“Ye-es, I am,” J.W. answered, “and then, again, I’m not.  It seems to me as if I had always known a lot of what we are getting in these classes, though there is plenty of new stuff too.  But until now I didn’t get much out of what I knew.  I’ve always liked to hear you, but you’re different.  As for most of the things I’ve heard, I just thought of it as religious talk, church stuff, you know.  It didn’t seem to matter, but here it is beginning to matter in all sorts of ways, and I can see that it matters to me.”

“How, for instance?”

Well, take the class in home missions; Americanization, they call it.  Maybe you noticed that the first thing the teacher did was to divide the class right down the middle, and tell those on the left hand—­yes, I’m one of the goats—­that for the rest of the week they were to consider themselves aliens.  The others were to play native-born Americans.  And so the study started, but believe me, we aliens have already begun to make it interesting for those natives.  Some of ’em want to come over on our side already, but they can’t.  A few of us have found some immigration dope in the college library, and it is pretty strong.  We’ll show up those Pilgrim Fathers before the week is out.  They think they have done everything an alien could ask when they let him into the country, and then they work him twelve hours a day, seven days a week, or else let him hunt the country over for any sort of a job.  They rob him by making him pay higher prices than other people for all he has to buy.  They force him to live in places not fit for rats, and on top of everything else they call him names, so that their kids stick up their noses at his children in the school grounds.  After all that they expect he’ll become a good citizen just by hearing ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ at the movies and watching the flag go by when there’s a parade.

“Say, Mr. Drury, it makes me sick, and, if I feel that way just to be pretending I’m a ‘Wop’ for a week, how do you suppose the real aliens feel?  Excuse me for talking like this, but honestly, something like that is going on in all these classes; I wish we could take up such things in the League at home.”  And he forced an embarrassed little laugh.

Pastor Drury laughed too, and said of course they could, as he linked arms with J.W., and they passed on down the road.  The preacher talked but little, contriving merely to drop a question now and then; and J.W. talked on, half-ashamed to be so “gabby,” as he put it, and yet moved by an impulse as pleasant as it was novel.

“And foreign missions, Mr. Drury.  You won’t be offended, I hope, but somehow as far back as I can remember I have always connected foreign missions with collections and ‘Greenland’s Icy Mountains’ and little naked Hottentots, and something—­I don’t know just what—­about the River Ganges.  But here—­why, that China class just makes me want to see China for myself and find out how much of the advantages of American life over Chinese has come on account of religion.”