eloquent extras, all the rhetoric or digression
on either side, was exasperating and unintelligible to the other.
Moon could not make head or tail of the solemnity of a new civilization.
Pym could not make head or tail of the gaiety of an old one.

"All the cases in which Smith has figured as an expropriator,"
continued the American doctor, "are cases of burglary.
Pursuing the same course as in the previous case, we select
the indubitable instance from the rest, and we take the most
correct cast-iron evidence. I will now call on my colleague,
Mr. Gould, to read a letter we have received from the earnest,
unspotted Canon of Durham, Canon Hawkins."

Mr. Moses Gould leapt up with his usual alacrity to read the letter from
the earnest and unspotted Hawkins. Moses Gould could imitate a farmyard well,
Sir Henry Irving not so well, Marie Lloyd to a point of excellence, and the
new motor horns in a manner that put him upon the platform of great artists.
But his imitation of a Canon of Durham was not convincing; indeed, the sense
of the letter was so much obscured by the extraordinary leaps and gasps of his
pronunciation that it is perhaps better to print it here as Moon read it when,
a little later, it was handed across the table.

"Dear Sir,--I can scarcely feel surprise that the incident
you mention, private as it was, should have filtered through
our omnivorous journals to the mere populace; for the position
I have since attained makes me, I conceive, a public character,
and this was certainly the most extraordinary incident
in a not uneventful and perhaps not an unimportant career.
I am by no means without experience in scenes of civil tumult.
I have faced many a political crisis in the old Primrose League
days at Herne Bay, and, before I broke with the wilder set,
have spent many a night at the Christian Social Union. But this
other experience was quite inconceivable. I can only describe
it as the letting loose of a place which it is not for me,
as a clergyman, to mention.

"It occurred in the days when I was, for a short period,
a curate at Hoxton; and the other curate, then my colleague,
induced me to attend a meeting which he described, I must say
profanely described, as calculated to promote the kingdom
of God. I found, on the contrary, that it consisted entirely
of men in corduroys and greasy clothes whose manners were coarse
and their opinions extreme.

"Of my colleague in question I wish to speak with