ut life. I hope that this was
Christianity. At any rate, it occurred at the moment when we went crash
into the omnibus.

It seemed to me that the hansom cab simply turned over on top of me,
like an enormous hood or hat. I then found myself crawling out from
underneath it in attitudes so undignified that they must have added
enormously to that great cause to which the Anti-Puritan League and I
have recently dedicated ourselves. I mean the cause of the pleasures of
the people. As to my demeanour when I emerged, I have two confessions to
make, and they are both made merely in the interests of mental science.
The first is that whereas I had been in a quite pious frame of mind the
moment before the collision, when I got to my feet and found I had got
off with a cut or two I began (like St. Peter) to curse and to swear.
A man offered me a newspaper or something that I had dropped. I can
distinctly remember consigning the paper to a state of irremediable
spiritual ruin. I am very sorry for this now, and I apologise both to
the man and to the paper. I have not the least idea what was the meaning
of this unnatural anger; I mention it as a psychological confession. It
was immediately followed by extreme hilarity, and I made so many silly
jokes to the policeman that he disgraced himself by continual laughter
before all the little boys in the street, who had hitherto taken him
seriously.

.....

There is one other odd thing about the matter which I also mention as
a curiosity of the human brain or deficiency of brain. At intervals of
about every three minutes I kept on reminding the policeman that I had
not paid the cabman, and that I hoped he would not lose his money. He
said it would be all right, and the man would appear. But it was not
until about half an hour afterwards that it suddenly struck me with a
shock intolerable that the man might conceivably have lost more
than half a crown; that he had been in danger as well as I. I had
instinctively regarded the cabman as something uplifted above accidents,
a god. I immediately made inquiries, and I am happy to say that they
seemed to have been unnecessary.

But henceforward I shall always understand with a darker and more
delicate charity those who take tythe of mint, and anise, and cumin,
and neglect the weightier matters of the law; I shall remember how I
was once really tortured with owing half a crown to a man who might
have been dead. Some admirable men in white coats at