I could not tell him the exact reason, which mainly was my dislike of the chaplain on account of his intimate companionship with the Hon. who had wrecked my life, so I said that I had no acquaintance with the chaplain; that according to social custom, as he had come last to the station, it was his place to call on us. If he had any interest in our religious welfare it was his duty to see us. If he was the shepherd and we the sheep, it was his place to look us up, and not ours to run after him. As he had never cared for us, either in health or in sickness, and we could live and die without his services, it seemed to me that we could be buried without his aid. “Believe me,” he answered, “I am not finding fault or criticising, but only referred to your not following the usual custom, and am rather pleased that you had courage to do what you thought best. For myself, I would prefer a solemn chant, or such a hymn as ‘Abide with me,’ or any hymn that would lead us to think of eternal life. I object to the service for the dead, as given in the prayer-book, being used for everybody, saint and sinner alike; not that I would be a judge of the dead, yet we cannot always restrain our thoughts and judgments. “When I stood at the grave of a man whom everybody knew as a drunkard, and we both knew such a man, who, going home at night drunk from a party, fell from his horse and broke his collar bone, and died from his injury mainly because he was dissipated. He was worse than a drunkard, a seducer of innocence, a debauchee, most profane and vulgar in all his conversation. He was vice personified; destitute of all pure noble feelings, spending his nights in vice and his days in intrigue, whose acquaintance was fatal to a woman, and who reveled in the putridity of immorality. Every decent person loathed him while he was living, and only recognized him because he was in a prominent government position. When we stood at his grave, and the chaplain said the words: “‘Forasmuch as it hath pleased Almighty God of his great mercy to take unto himself the soul of our dear brother here departed, we therefore commit his body to the ground, earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust; in sure and certain hope of the Resurrection to eternal life through our Lord Jesus Christ,—’ “I could not help thinking, you are either a fool or a liar and I recalled the saying of Garibaldi: ‘A priest knows himself to be an imposter unless he be a fool, or have been taught to lie from boyhood.’