Heigho! mine is a dull life, I fear, when this little affair of the doctor and the clergyman takes the dignity of an incident, and seems worthy of being recorded.

The doctor was anxious that, during the following winter, a short course of lectures should be delivered in the village schoolroom, and in my garden he held several conferences on the matter with the clergyman and myself.  It was arranged finally that the lectures should be delivered, and that one of them should be delivered by me.  I need not say how pleasant was the writing out of my discourse, and how the pleasure was heightened by the slightest thrill of alarm at my own temerity.  My lecture I copied out in my most careful hand, and, as I had it by heart, I used to declaim passages of it ensconced in my moss-house, or concealed behind my shrubbery trees.  In these places I tried it all over, sentence by sentence.  The evening came at last which had been looked forward to for a couple of months or more.  The small schoolroom was filled by forms on which the people sat, and a small reading-desk, with a tumbler of water on it, at the further end, waited for me.  When I took my seat, the couple of hundred eyes struck into me a certain awe.  I discovered in a moment why the orator of the hustings is so deferential to the mob.  You may despise every individual member of your audience, but these despised individuals, in their capacity of a collective body, overpower you.  I addressed the people with the most unfeigned respect.  When I began, too, I found what a dreadful thing it is to hear your own voice inhabiting the silence.  You are related to your voice, and yet divorced from it.  It is you, and yet a thing apart.  All the time it is going on, you can be critical as to its tone, volume, cadence, and other qualities, as if it was the voice of a stranger.  Gradually, however, I got accustomed to my voice, and the respect which I entertained for my hearers so far relaxed that I was at last able to look them in the face.  I saw the doctor and the clergyman smile encouragingly, and my half-witted gardener looking up at me with open mouth, and the atrabilious confectioner clap his hands, which made me take refuge in my paper again.  I got to the end of my task without any remarkable incident, if I except the doctor’s once calling out “hear” loudly, which brought the heart into my mouth, and blurred half a sentence.  When I sat down, there were the usual sounds of approbation, and the confectioner returned thanks, in the name of the audience.

ON VAGABONDS