India a hopeful
field." "Hopeful field indeed," replied the chaplain; "I should rather
think so! You begin at L400 a year."

A too transparent honesty which reveals each transient emotion through
the medium of suddenly chosen words is not without its perils. None that
heard it could ever forget Norman Macleod's story of the Presbyterian
minister who, when he noticed champagne-glasses on the dinner-table,
began his grace, "Bountiful Jehovah!" but, when he saw only
claret-glasses, subsided into, "We are not worthy of the least of Thy
mercies." I deny the right of Bishop Wilberforce in narrating this story
in his diary to stigmatize this good man as "gluttonous." He was simply
honest, and his honesty led him into one of those "Things one would
rather have expressed differently." But, however expressed, the meaning
would have been the same, and equally sound.

Absence of mind, of course, conversationally slays its thousands, though
perhaps more by the way of "Things one would rather have left unsaid"
than by "Things one would rather have expressed differently." The late
Archbishop Trench, a man of singularly vague and dreamy habits, resigned
the See of Dublin on account of advancing years, and settled in London.
He once went back to pay a visit to his successor, Lord Plunket. Finding
himself back again in his old palace, sitting at his old dinner-table,
and gazing across it at his old wife, he lapsed in memory to the days
when he was master of the house, and gently remarked to Mrs. Trench, "I
am afraid, my love, that we must put this cook down among our failures."
Delight of Lord and Lady Plunket!

Medical men are sometimes led by carelessness of phrase into giving
their patients shocks. The country doctor who, combining in his
morning's round a visit to the Squire and another to the Vicar, said
that he was trying to kill two birds with one stone, would probably have
expressed himself differently if he had premeditated his remark; and a
London physician who found his patient busy composing a book of
Recollections, and asked, "Why have you put it off so long?" uttered a
"Thing one would rather have left unsaid." The "donniest" of Oxford dons
in an unexampled fit of good nature once undertook to discharge the
duties of the chaplain of Oxford Jail during the Long Vacation.
Unluckily it so fell out that he had to perform the terrible office of
preparing a criminal for execution, and it was felt that he said a
"Thing one woul