I
have heard him say with a fatuous smile that there were literally
hundreds of people who day by day brought their pitcher of self-
pity to be filled at his pump of sympathy: that he wished he could
have a little rest, but that he supposed that it was a plain duty
for him to minister thus to human needs, though it took it out of
him terribly. I suppose that some sort of experience must have lain
behind this confession, for my friend was a decidedly moral man,
and would not tell a deliberate untruth; the only difficulty was
that I could not conceive where he kept his stores of sympathy,
because I had never heard him speak of any subject except himself,
and I suppose that his method of consolation, if he was consulted,
was to relate some striking instance out of his own experience in
which grace triumphed over nature.
Sometimes, again, the dramatic sense takes the form of an
exaggerated self-depreciation. I was reading the other day the
life of a very devoted clergyman, who said on his death-bed to one
standing by him, "If anything is done in memory of me, let a plain
slab be placed on my grave with my initials and the date, and the
words, 'the unworthy priest of this parish'--that must be all.
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