I thought it very unlikely that I should hear the curate preach. I meant to go to church, of course. I should have no choice about that. But in my youth, when I lived with uncle Ambrose, I acquired a faculty of abstracting my mind from sermons. I could now, I believe, carry on a complicated train of thought undisturbed if St. Chrysostom were thundering golden words in a pulpit close beside me. Nevertheless I did, very much to my surprise, hear that curate's sermon. At least I heard the latter part of it. At first I was fully occupied in going over in my mind the points of the story which lay at the bottom of my bag in the rectory. That story was not a good subject for Sunday meditation, especially in church. But I am glad I happened to be thinking of it, for if my mind had been occupied with anything else I might have missed an interesting sensation.
The curate had been meandering quietly along for about ten minutes, and I sat enjoying my author's method of satirizing a particular moral platitude which he had put in the mouth of one of the characters in the story. Then I heard, actually heard with my ears, the very words which the character in the story had used. The curate said them. I sat up, awakened to consciousness by the extraordinary coincidence. A few minutes later Mr. Metcalf quoted another sentence out of the story, another of the moral truisms which the author had made to look so supremely contemptible. Of course,
