to
speak of my belongings and myself in flattering terms, to which I hope
that I suitably responded. When I resumed my seat my butcher friend
exclaimed, with the most obvious sincerity, "I declare, sir, I'm quite
ashamed of myself. To think that I have been sitting alongside of a
gentleman all the evening, and never found it out!"

The doorkeepers and attendants at the House of Commons are all old
servants, who generally have lived in great families, and have obtained
their places through influential recommendations. One of these fine old
men encountered, on the opening day of a new Parliament, a young sprig
of a great family who had just been for the first time elected to the
House of Commons, and thus accosted him, with tears in his eyes: "I am
glad indeed, sir, to see you here; and when I think that I helped to put
your noble grandfather and grandmother both into their coffins, it makes
me feel quite at home with you." Never, surely, was a political career
more impressively auspicated.

These Verbal Infelicities are by no means confined to social
intercourse. Lord Cross, when the House laughed at his memorable speech
in favour of Spiritual Peers, exclaimed in solemn remonstrance, "I hear
a smile." When the Bishop of Southwell, preaching in the London Mission
of 1885, began his sermon by saying, "I feel a feeling which I feel you
all feel," it is only fair to assume that he said something which he
would rather have expressed differently. Quite lately I heard an Irish
rhetorician exclaim, "If the Liberal Party is to maintain its position,
it must move forward." A clerical orator, fresh from a signal triumph at
a Diocesan Conference, informed me, together with some hundreds of
other hearers, that when his resolution was put "quite a shower of hands
went up;" and at a missionary meeting I once heard that impressive
personage, "the Deputation from the Parent Society," involve himself
very delightfully in extemporaneous imagery. He had been explaining that
here in England we hear so much of the rival systems and operations of
the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel and the Church Missionary
Society that we are often led to regard them as hostile institutions;
whereas if, as he himself had done, his hearers would go out to the
mission-field and observe the working of the societies at close
quarters, they would find them to be in essential unison. "Even so," he
exclaimed; "as I walked in the beautiful park which adjo