to solace himself when alone.  I,—­I who write this,—­have myself seen an honoured guest deluge with the pump my, ah! so hardly earned, most scarce and most peculiar vintage!  There is a pang in such usage which some will not understand, but which cut Mr. Mainwaring to the very soul.  There was not one among them there who appreciated the fact that the claret on his dinner table was almost the best that its year had produced.  It was impossible not to say a word on such a subject at such a moment;—­though our rector was not a man who usually lauded his own viands.  “I think you will find that claret what you like, Mr. Gotobed,” he said.  “It’s a ’57 Mouton, and judges say that it is good.”

“Very good indeed,” said the Senator.  “In the States we haven’t got into the way yet of using dinner clarets.”  It was as good as a play to see the rector wince under the ignominious word.  “Your great statesman added much to your national comfort when he took the duty off the lighter kinds of French wines.”

The rector could not stand it.  He hated light wines.  He hated cheap things in general.  And he hated Gladstone in particular.  “Nothing,” said he, “that the statesman you speak of ever did could make such wine as that any cheaper.  I am sorry, Sir, that you don’t perceive the difference.”

“In the matter of wine,” said the Senator, “I don’t think that I have happened to come across anything so good in this country as our old Madeiras.  But then, sir, we have been fortunate in our climate.  The English atmosphere is not one in which wine seems to reach its full perfection.”  The rector heaved a deep sigh as he looked up to the ceiling with his hands in his trowsers-pockets.  He knew, or thought that he knew, that no one could ever get a glass of good wine in the United States.  He knew, or thought that he knew, that the best wine in the world was brought to England.  He knew, or thought he knew, that in no other country was wine so well understood, so diligently sought for, and so truly enjoyed as in England.  And he imagined that it was less understood and less sought for and less enjoyed in the States than in any other country.  He did not as yet know the Senator well enough to fight with him at his own table, and could only groan and moan and look up at the ceiling.  Doctor Nupper endeavoured to take away the sting by smacking his lips, and Reginald Morton, who did not in truth care a straw what he drank, was moved to pity and declared the claret to be very fine.  “I have nothing to say against it,” said the Senator, who was not in the least abashed.

But when the cloth was drawn, for the rector clung so lovingly to old habits that he delighted to see his mahogany beneath the wine glasses,—­a more serious subject of dispute arose suddenly, though perhaps hardly more disagreeable.  “The thing in England,” said the Senator, “which I find most difficult to understand, is the matter of what you call Church patronage.”