An imperfect sympathy with the prepossessions of one’s environment may often lead the unwary talker to give a totally erroneous impression of his meaning.  Thus the Professor of Sanskrit at Oxford once brought an Indian army chaplain to dine at the high table of Oriel, and in the common room after dinner the Fellows courteously turned the conversation to the subject of life and work in India, on which the chaplain held forth with fluency and zest.  When he had made an end of speaking, the Professor of Anglo-Saxon, who was not only a very learned scholar but also a very devout clergyman, leaned forward and said, “I am a little hard of hearing, sir, but from what I could gather I rejoice to infer that you consider the position of an army chaplain in India a hopeful field.”  “Hopeful field indeed,” replied the chaplain; “I should rather think so!  You begin at L400 a year.”

A too transparent honesty which reveals each transient emotion through the medium of suddenly chosen words is not without its perils.  None that heard it could ever forget Norman Macleod’s story of the Presbyterian minister who, when he noticed champagne-glasses on the dinner-table, began his grace, “Bountiful Jehovah!” but, when he saw only claret-glasses, subsided into, “We are not worthy of the least of Thy mercies.”  I deny the right of Bishop Wilberforce in narrating this story in his diary to stigmatize this good man as “gluttonous.”  He was simply honest, and his honesty led him into one of those “Things one would rather have expressed differently.”  But, however expressed, the meaning would have been the same, and equally sound.

Absence of mind, of course, conversationally slays its thousands, though perhaps more by the way of “Things one would rather have left unsaid” than by “Things one would rather have expressed differently.”  The late Archbishop Trench, a man of singularly vague and dreamy habits, resigned the See of Dublin on account of advancing years, and settled in London.  He once went back to pay a visit to his successor, Lord Plunket.  Finding himself back again in his old palace, sitting at his old dinner-table, and gazing across it at his old wife, he lapsed in memory to the days when he was master of the house, and gently remarked to Mrs. Trench, “I am afraid, my love, that we must put this cook down among our failures.”  Delight of Lord and Lady Plunket!

Medical men are sometimes led by carelessness of phrase into giving their patients shocks.  The country doctor who, combining in his morning’s round a visit to the Squire and another to the Vicar, said that he was trying to kill two birds with one stone, would probably have expressed himself differently if he had premeditated his remark; and a London physician who found his patient busy composing a book of Recollections, and asked, “Why have you put it off so long?” uttered a “Thing one would rather have left unsaid.”  The “donniest” of Oxford dons in an unexampled fit of good nature once undertook