Page:The kernel and the husk (Abbott, 1886).djvu/310

294 when in one moment I recovered both power of motion and knowledge that I was alive again, I leapt up from the dentist's arm-chair, and, without taking the least notice of the two operators, I gave vent to my feelings by shouting aloud the well-known words from Clarence's dream—

I shall not easily forget the look of mingled humour and horror with which the dentist replied, "Well, sir, considering you are a clergyman, I should have hoped it might have been the other place." I tried to explain. I assured him that it was a quotation from Shakespeare; that I had not really believed that I was in the place commonly called Hell; and so on. But I am quite sure my explanations were utterly ineffectual; and to this day I probably labour under the suspicion, in the minds of at least two worthy persons, of having committed some horrible crime by which my conscience is racked with agony. In reality, however, it was a small offence, if any, for which I suffered that bad quarter of a minute; and I have often since thought that, if the mind is capable of inflicting such pain upon itself for a venial error, those pangs must be terrible indeed with which our sinful souls may be forced to scourge themselves when we judicially review the actions of a selfish life with a compulsory knowledge of all the evil, direct and indirect, which we have wrought, and when we realize at last—ah, how differently from the dull, decorous, conventional contrition with which we droned out the words on earth, kneeling on the hassocks in the family pew—that "we have left undone those things which we ought to have done, and done those things which we ought not to have done."

But why do I thus discourse in detail upon a subject