“I hope he will not preach,” thought Harry, who was absorbed in a rapt contemplation of his sweetheart’s back hair.  He came back from a tender revery (by way of a little detour into the furniture business and the establishment that a man of his income could afford) to the church and the preacher and his own sins, to find the strange clergyman in the pulpit, plainly frightened, and bawling more loudly than ever under the influence of fear.  He preached a sermon of wearisome platitudes; making up for lack of thought by repetition, and shouting himself red in the face to express earnestness.  “Fourth-class Methodist effort,” thought the listener in the Lossing pew, stroking his fair mustache, “with Episcopal decorations!  That man used to be a Methodist minister, and he was brought into the fold by a high-churchman.  Poor fellow, the Methodist church polity has a place for such fellows as he; but he is a stray sheep with us.  He doesn’t half catch on to the motions; yet I’ll warrant he is proud of that sermon, and his wife thinks it one of the great efforts of the century.”  Here Harry took a short rest from the sermon, to contemplate the amazing moral phenomenon:  how robust can be a wife’s faith in a commonplace husband!

“Now, this man,” reflected Harry, growing interested in his own fancies, “this man never can have lived!  He doesn’t know what it is to suffer, he has only vegetated!  Doubtless, in a prosaic way, he loves his wife and children; but can a fellow who talks like him have any delicate sympathies or any romance about him?  He looks honest; I think he is a right good fellow and works like a soldier; but to be so stupid as he is, ought to hurt!”

Harry felt a whimsical moving of sympathy towards the preacher.  He wondered why he continually made gestures with the left arm, never with his right.

“It gives a one-sided effect to his eloquence,” said he.  But he thought that he understood when an unguarded movement revealed a rent which had been a mended place in the surplice.

“Poor fellow,” said Harry.  He recalled how, as a boy, he had gone to a fancy-dress ball in Continental smallclothes, so small that he had been strictly cautioned by his mother and sisters not to bow except with the greatest care, lest he rend his magnificence and reveal that it was too tight to allow an inch of underclothing.  The stockings, in particular, had been short, and his sister had providently sewed them on to the knee-breeches, and to guard against accidents still further, had pinned as well as sewed, the pins causing Harry much anguish.

“Poor fellow!” said Harry again, “I wonder is he pinned somewhere?  I feel like giving him a lift; he is so prosy it isn’t likely anyone else will feel moved to help.”

Thus it came about that when the dean announced that the alms this day would be given to the parish of our friend who had just addressed us; and the plate paused before the Lossing pew, Harry slipped his hand into his waistcoat pocket after those two five-dollar notes.