["I beg your pardon! I've been afloat," was the graceful parenthetical
apology which a distinguished naval officer used to make, when by
mistake he let drop one of "those big words which lie at the bottom of
the best man's vocabulary," in conversation with sensitive persons whose
ears he feared it might offend. I ought possibly, at the end of the
following anecdote, to make some such excuse to the scrupulous reader,
whose notions of propriety it will perhaps slightly infringe: "I beg
your pardon! I couldn't help telling it."]
An eminent divine once described to me a scene he witnessed at a
funeral, which he said nearly caused him to expire with--well, you shall
see. An intimate acquaintance of his, who belonged to a neighboring
parish, having died, he was naturally induced to assist at the
burial-service. The rector of this parish was a man who, though
sensitive in the extreme to the absurdities of others,--being, in fact,
a regular son of Momus,--was entirely unconscious of his own amusing
eccentricities. Among these, numerous and singular, he had the habit
of suddenly stopping in the middle of a sentence, while preaching, and
calling out to the sexton, across the church, "Dooke, turn on more gas!"
or "Dooke, shut that window!" or "Dooke, do"--something else which
was pretty sure to be wanting itself done during the delivery of his
discourse. Nearly every Sunday, strangers not acquainted with his ways
were startled out of their propriety by some such unexpected behavior.
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