thought I had been careful not to trespass on your preserves."

"As for preserves, I don't know of any," answered the curate. "There
is no true bird in the grounds that won't manage somehow to escape
the snare of the fowler."

"Well," said the doctor, "I know nothing about God and all that kind
of thing, but, though I don't think I'm a coward exactly either, I
know I should like to have your pluck."

"I haven't got any pluck," said the curate.

"Tell that to the marines," said Faber. "I daren't go and say what I
think or don't think, even in the bedroom of my least orthodox
patient--at least, if I do, I instantly repent it--while you go on
saying what you really believe Sunday after Sunday!--How you can
believe it, I don't know, and it's no business of mine."

"Oh yes, it is!" returned Wingfold. "But as to the pluck, it may be
a man's duty to say in the pulpit what he would be just as wrong to
say by a sick-bed."

"That has nothing to do with the pluck! That's all I care about."

"It has everything to do with what you take for pluck. My pluck is
only Don Worm."

"I don't know what you mean by that."

"It's Benedick's name, in Much Ado about Nothing, for the