ever once. My experience may be small. It
may be insufficient. But it has never occurred to me before."

"I have never heard of it," I said, "as among the duties of a clergyman.
But I am not well up in church matters. Excuse me if perhaps I failed to
follow you correctly. Dressed up--as what?"

"As an old woman," said the vicar solemnly, "as an old woman."

I thought in my heart that it required no great transformation to make
an old woman of him, but the thing was evidently more tragic than comic,
and I said respectfully:

"May I ask how it occurred?"

"I will begin at the beginning," said Mr Shorter, "and I will tell my
story with the utmost possible precision. At seventeen minutes past
eleven this morning I left the vicarage to keep certain appointments and
pay certain visits in the village. My first visit was to Mr Jervis, the
treasurer of our League of Christian Amusements, with whom I concluded
some business touching the claim made by Parkes the gardener in the
matter of the rolling of our tennis lawn. I then visited Mrs Arnett, a
very earnest churchwoman, but permanently bedridden. She is the author
of several small works of devotion, and of a book of verse, entitled
(unless my memory misleads me) Eglantine."

He uttered all this not only with deliberation, but with something that
can only be called, by a contradictory phrase, eager deliberation.
He had, I think, a vague memory in his head of the detectives in the
detective stories, who always sternly require that nothing should be
kept back.

"I then proceeded," he went on, with the same maddening
conscientiousness of manner, "to Mr Carr (not Mr James Carr, of course;
Mr Robert Carr) who is temporarily assisting our organist, and having
consulted with him (on the subject of a choir boy who is accused, I
cannot as yet say whether justly or not, of cutting holes in the organ
pipes), I finally dropped in upon a Dorcas meeting at the house of Miss
Brett. The Dorcas meetings are usually held at the vicarage, but my wife
being unwell, Miss Brett, a newcomer in our village, but very active in
church work, had very kindly consented to hold them. The Dorcas society
is entirely under my wife's management as a rule, and except for Miss
Brett, who, as I say, is very active, I scarcely know any members of it.
I had, however, promised to drop in on them, and I did so.

"When I arrived there were only four other maiden ladies with Miss
Brett, but they were sewing very