I launched him by sending him to a meeting of the Enlightenment Board.  The Enlightenment Board consists of seventy-four members, of whom sixty-seven are necessary to form a quorum.  One becomes a member under the regulations laid down in old Judge Dudley’s will.  I became one by being ordained pastor of a church in Naguadavick.  You see you cannot help yourself, if you would.  At this particular time we had had four successive meetings, averaging four hours each,—­wholly occupied in whipping in a quorum.  At the first only eleven men were present; at the next, by force of three circulars, twenty-seven; at the third, thanks to two days’ canvassing by Auchmuty and myself, begging men to come, we had sixty.  Half the others were in Europe.  But without a quorum we could do nothing.  All the rest of us waited grimly for our four hours, and adjourned without any action.  At the fourth meeting we had flagged, and only got fifty-nine together.  But on the first appearance of my double,—­whom I sent on this fatal Monday to the fifth meeting,—­he was the sixty-seventh man who entered the room.  He was greeted with a storm of applause!  The poor fellow had missed his way,—­read the street signs ill through his spectacles (very ill, in fact, without them),—­and had not dared to inquire.  He entered the room,—­finding the president and secretary holding to their chairs two judges of the Supreme Court, who were also members ex officio, and were begging leave to go away.  On his entrance all was changed. Presto, the by-laws were suspended, and the Western property was given away.  Nobody stopped to converse with him.  He voted, as I had charged him to do, in every instance, with the minority.  I won new laurels as a man of sense, though a little unpunctual,—­and Dennis, alias Ingham, returned to the parsonage, astonished to see with how little wisdom the world is governed.  He cut a few of my parishioners in the street; but he had his glasses off, and I am known to be near-sighted.  Eventually he recognized them more readily than I.

I “set him again” at the exhibition of the New Coventry Academy; and here he undertook a “speaking part,”—­as, in my boyish, worldly days, I remember the bills used to say of Mlle. Celeste.  We are all trustees of the New Coventry Academy; and there has lately been “a good deal of feeling” because the Sandemanian trustees did not regularly attend the exhibitions.  It has been intimated, indeed, that the Sandemanians are leaning towards Free-Will, and that we have, therefore, neglected these semiannual exhibitions, while there is no doubt that Auchmuty last year went to Commencement at Waterville.  Now the head master at New Coventry is a real good fellow, who knows a Sanskrit root when he sees it, and often cracks etymologies with me,—­so that, in strictness, I ought to go to their exhibitions.  But think, reader, of sitting through three long July days in that Academy chapel, following the programme from