different sound entirely. In the same way the Dean would go on:

"I was voyaging on one of those magnificent leviathans of the
water,--I refer to the boats of the Northern Navigation Company,--and
was standing beside the forward rail talking with a dear brother in
the faith who was journeying westward also--I may say he was a
commercial traveller,--and beside us was a dear sister in the spirit
seated in a deck chair, while near us were two other dear souls in
grace engaged in Christian pastime on the deck,--I allude more
particularly to the game of deck billiards."

I leave it to any reasonable man whether, with that complete and
fair-minded explanation of the environment, it was not perfectly
proper to close down the analogy, as the rector did, with the simple
words: "In fact, it was an extremely fine morning."

Yet there were some people, even in Mariposa, that took exception and
spent their Sunday dinner time in making out that they couldn't
understand what Dean Drone was talking about, and asking one another
if they knew. Once, as he passed out from the doors of the Greater
Testimony, the rector heard some one say: "The Church would be all
right if that old mugwump was out of the pulpit." It went to his
heart like a barbed thorn, and stayed there.

You know, perhaps, how a remark of that sort can stay and rankle, and
make you wish you could hear it again to make sure of it, because
perhaps you didn't hear it aright, and it was a mistake after all.
Perhaps no one said it, anyway. You ought to have written it down at
the time. I have seen the Dean take down the encyclopaedia in the
rectory, and move his finger slowly down the pages of the letter M,