But the great moment was now close at hand, and I could not forbear turning for a moment in my place and glancing down the aisle at the procession of sidesmen, already formed and waiting my father’s signal. For from now onwards even I myself was a little uncertain of my father’s intentions, although I did not apprehend that he would begin his denunciation before the last of the sidesmen had yielded up his plate. Then I glanced at the vicar, who had come to the chancel steps; at the curate, who was plucking at his stole; and finally at the bird, with its brazen eye fixed as before on my approaching father. For the hymn had come to an end now and the procession was in motion, with my father in the van carrying his plate, followed by Alexander Carkeek, Mr. Balfour Whey, Mr. Meatson, Cosmo and Corkran. Slowly they proceeded, with Mr. Carkeek, as usual, chafing at the necessity of having to march second, but obviously intoxicated with pride and self-satisfaction as the people in the pews craned their heads to look at him. So disgusting indeed did I find the spectacle that I was obliged for some seconds to close my eyes, and it was during this brief interval that there happened the awful thing that was finally to shatter my father’s health. For when I opened them again, pale and petrified, it was once more to behold my father caught and transfixed and stertorously advancing into the same ingenious and devilish trap. But now it was too late, though I gave a great cry, and yet that cry, perhaps, may have modified the disaster. For at the last instant, as though he had half-regained consciousness, my father swerved a little to the right, albeit only to stumble and fall at full length over the south-west talons of the pedestal. And yet even then the sidesman in him remained uppermost. For though a half-crown had been jerked from his plate, he never let this go until he had safely grounded it at the very feet of the vicar. Nay, he rose higher. For observing that the half-crown was hurrying towards a grating at the end of the transept, and perceiving that Corkran Carkeek, obeying his family’s instinct, had suddenly leapt forward and was hastening after it, he bade me try and secure it before the young Caledonian had succeeded in capturing it for his own box. “But your poor self?” I cried. “Never mind me,” he said, “or he’ll get his foot on that half-crown.” And it was then, and only then, that he yielded to Nature with shriek after shriek of unutterable pain.