"Perhaps not; but there is a large class who would scarcely be much moved by stronger and abler words than, I suppose, we heard to-day--spoken as they were spoken. These preachers won't study the fitness of things; that's the worst of it. I have known a garrison chaplain deliver a discourse that, I am convinced, was composed for a visitation. It seems absurd to hear a man warning us against a particular sin, and threatening us with all sorts of penalties if we indulge in it, when it is impossible that he himself should ever have felt the temptation. We want some one who can find out the harmless side of our character, as well as the diseased part, and work upon it. Such a person may be as strict and harsh as he pleases, but he is listened to." He paused for a moment, and went on in a graver tone--"I think it might have done even _me_ some good, when I was younger, to have talked for half an hour with the man who wrote 'How Amyas threw his sword away.'" Cecil could not disagree with him now, nor did she wish to do so. She liked those last words of his better than any he had spoken. Remember, she was born and bred in the honest west country, where one, at least, of their own prophets hath honor. If you want to indulge your enthusiasm for the Rector of Eversley, let your next walking-tour turn thitherward; for on all the sea-board from Portsmouth to Penzance, there is never a woman--maid, wife, or widow--that will say you nay. Keene saw his advantage, but was far too wise to follow it up then. The weaker sex, as a rule, are acute but not very close reasoners; they mix up their majors and minors with a charming recklessness; and, if innocent of nothing else, are generally guiltless of a syllogism. It follows that, in the course of an argument, it is easy enough to entangle them in their talk. When such a chance occurs, don't come down on your pretty antagonist with "I thought you said so and so," but be politic as well as generous, and pass it by. They will do more justice to your self-denial than they would have done to your dialectic talents. Corinna loves to be contradicted, but hates to be convinced, and dreads no monster so much as a short-horned--dilemma. She may forgive the first offense as inadvertent, but "one more such victory and you are lost." Think how often clemency has succeeded where severity would have failed. What did that discreet Eastern emir, when he found his fair young wife sleeping in a garden, where she had no earthly business to be? He laid his drawn sabre softly across her neck, and retired without breaking her slumbers. The cold blade was the first thing Zuleika felt when she woke; I can not guess what her sensations were; but when she gave the weapon back to her solemn lord, she pressed her rosy lips thrice on the blue steel, and made a vow that she most probably kept; and Hussein Bey never was happier, than when he drew her back to his broad breast, looking into her face silently with his calm, grave smile.