kened, and asked why I am gasping so horribly and
perspiring so freely, I have to confess that I was dreaming that I had
somehow become the minister of that childless congregation. As is
usual after nightmare, I look round with a sense of inexpressible
thankfulness on discovering that it was only a horrid dream. An
appointment to such a charge would be to me a most fearsome and
terrifying prospect. I could not trust myself. In a way, I envy the
man who can hold his own under such circumstances. His transcendent
powers enable him to preserve his sturdy humanness of character, his
charming simplicity of diction, his graphic picturesqueness of phrase,
and his exquisite winsomeness of behaviour without the extraneous
assistance which the children render to some of us. But _I_ could not
do it. I should go all to pieces. And so, when I dream that I have
entered a pulpit from which I can survey no roguish young faces and
mischievous wide-open eyes, I fancy I am ruined and undone. I watch
with consternation as the little people file out during the hymn before
the sermon, and I know that the sermon is doomed. The children in the
congregation are my salvation.

I fancy that the custom to which I have referred was in vogue in the
church to which the Rev. Bruno Leathwaite Chilvers ministered.
Everybody knows Mr. Chilvers; at least everybody who loves George
Gissing knows that very excellent gentleman. Mr. Chilvers loved to
adorn his dainty discourses with certain words of strangely
grandiloquent sound. '"Nullifidian," "morbific," "renascent"--these
were among his favourites. Once or twice he spoke of "psychogenesis"
with an emphatic enunciation which seemed to invite respectful wonder.
In using Latin words which have become fixed in the English language,
he generally corrected the common errors of quantity and pronounced
words as nobody else did. He often alluded to French and German
authors in order that he might recite French and German quotations.'
And so on. Poor Mr. Chilvers! I am sure that the little children
filed out during the hymn before the sermon. No man with a scrap of
imagination could look into the dimpled face of a little girl I know
and hurl 'nullifidian' at her. No man could look down into a certain
pair of sparkling eyes that are wonderfully familiar to me and talk
about things as 'morbific' or 'renascent.' If only the little tots had
kept their seats for the sermon, it would have saved poor Mr