To my complete and indescribable confusion, Ronald, nothing loth, accepted the challenge with delight, and the next moment was standing on the platform addressing an appreciative audience. What a sermon he gave them!—lasting without a pause or break for exactly half-an-hour; every thought reasoned out, and closing with a peroration of consummate eloquence. By a clever feint he had diverted the text of the preacher to one on the Pharisee and the Publican, making a scathing attack on the Pharisaism of the day, which went to church, and gave its alms openly and never in secret; which paid its way and kept the conventional commandments, and neglected (as of little count) the weightier things of unselfishness and love. “A day is coming when it will matter nothing where we lived, nor in what occupations, nor amidst what circumstances, but only how we wrought, and in what spirit we suffered. Be the thing you say; be unselfish, in your own poor way, to your friends and to your home, and to the world about you; that is worth ten thousand sermons and a hundred thousand Articles of Religion.” A dead silence followed as he stepped down from the platform; he had left a charm upon us that it seemed sacrilege to break. Then came a word or two. “What a wonderful boy!—a second Spurgeon; with all his eloquence and none of his irreverence.” “Summat worth hearin’, I calls it; how he did pitch into they bloomin’ aristocrats. I’ll come and hear ye, young master, whensomdever you holds forth agin.” “Well—I never!” It was with this ungrammatical aposiopesis that I started, so soon as I could find breath to start at all. “Where on earth, Ronald, did you get it all from?” The boy had come back to me looking as cool as a cucumber, and highly delighted with the sensation he had created. “Don’t tell, Fred,” he answered, “but it was a sermon of Vaughan’s. We are made to analyse his sermons at school, and say them afterwards for repetition lessons. So when that old donkey fell foul of the publican, I had one handy you see, on that very subject, and I thought it a pity not to fire it off.”