was the nature of the bit of paper in his hand,--with the notes
which he had accepted from the dean with so much reluctance, with
such an agony of spirit. In all these thoughts of his own about his
own doings, and his own position, he almost admitted to himself his
own insanity, his inability to manage his own affairs with that
degree of rational sequence which is taken for granted as belonging
to a man when he is made subject to criminal laws. As he puzzled his
brain in his efforts to create a memory as to the cheque, and
succeeded in bringing to his mind a recollection that he had once
known something about the cheque,--that the cheque had at one time
been the subject of a thought and of a resolution,--he admitted to
himself that in accordance with all law and all reason he must be
regarded as a thief. He had taken and used and spent that which he
ought to have known was not his own;--which he would have known
not to be his own but for some terrible incapacity with which God
had afflicted him. What then must be the result? His mind was
clear enough about this. If the jury could see everything and know
everything,--as he would wish that they should do; and if this
bishop's commission, and the bishop himself, and the Court of Arches
with its judge, could see and know everything; and if so seeing
and so knowing they could act with clear honesty and perfect
wisdom,--what would they do? They would declare of him that he was
not a thief, only because he was so muddy-minded, so addle-pated as
not to know the difference between meum and tuum! There could be no
other end to it, let all the lawyers and all the clergymen in England
put their wits to it. Thought he knew himself to be muddy-minded and
addle-pated, he could see that. And could any one say of such a man
that he was fit to be the acting clergyman of a parish,--to have
freehold possession in a parish as curer of men's souls! The bishop
was in the right of it, let him be ten times as mean a fellow as he
was.

And yet as he sat there on the gate, while the rain came down heavily
upon him, even when admitting the justice of the bishop, and the
truth of the verdict which the jury would no doubt give, and the
propriety of the action which that cold, reasonable, prosperous man
at Silverbridge would take, he pitied himself with a tenderness of
commiseration which knew no bounds. As for those belonging to him,
his wife and children, his pity for them was of a different kind