But the investigation proceeded.

“What was your Persuasion then?”

Tillie saw, in the teacher’s hesitation, that he did not understand the question.

“My ‘Persuasion’?  Oh!  I see.  You mean my Church?”

“Yes, what’s your conwictions?”

He considered a moment.  Tillie hung breathlessly upon his answer.  She knew how much depended upon it with this Board of “plain” people.  Could he assure them that he was “a Bible Christian”?  Otherwise, they would never elect him to the New Canaan school.  He gave his reply, presently, in a tone suggesting his having at that moment recalled to memory just what his “Persuasion” was.  “Let me see—­yes—­I’m a Truth-Seeker.”

“What’s that again?” inquired the president, with interest.  “I have not heard yet of that Persuasion.”

“A Truth-Seeker,” he gravely explained, “is one who believes in—­ eh—­in a progress from an indefinite, incoherent homogeneity to a definite, coherent heterogeneity.”

The members looked at each other cautiously.

“Is that the English you’re speakin’, or whatever?” asked the Dunkard member.  “Some of them words ain’t familiar with me till now, and I don’t know right what they mean.”

“Yes, I’m talking English,” nodded the applicant.  “We also believe,” he added, growing bolder, “in the fundamental, biogenetic law that ontogenesis is an abridged repetition of philogenesis.”

“He says they believe in Genesis,” remarked the Old Mennonite, appealing for aid, with bewildered eyes, to the other members.

“Maybe he’s a Jew yet!” put in Nathaniel Puntz.  “We also believe,” Mr. Fairchilds continued, beginning to enjoy himself, “in the revelations of science.”

“He believes in Genesis and in Revelations,” explained the president to the others.

“Maybe he’s a Cat’lic!” suggested the suspicious Mr. Puntz.

“No,” said Fairchilds, “I am, as I said, a Truth-Seeker.  A Truth-Seeker can no more be a Catholic or a Jew in faith than an Amishman can, or a Mennonite, or a Brennivinarian.”

Tillie knew he was trying to say “Winebrennarian,” the name of one of the many religious sects of the county, and she wondered at his not knowing better.

“You ain’t a gradyate, neither, are you?” was the president’s next question, the inscrutable mystery of the applicant’s creed being for the moment dropped.

“Why, yes, I thought you knew that.  Of Harvard.”

“Och, that!” contemptuously; “I mean you ain’t a gradyate of Millersville Normal?”

“No,” humbly acknowledged Fairchilds.

“When I was young,” Mr. Getz irrelevantly remarked, “we didn’t have no gradyate teachers like what they have now, still.  But we anyhow learnt more according.”

“How long does it take you to get ’em from a, b, c’s to the Testament?” inquired the patriarchal Dunkard.

“That depends upon the capacity of the pupil,” was Mr. Fairchilds’s profound reply.