"Merely that you were going to impersonate a clergyman who was due to come here and preach this next Sunday. How you were going to achieve this feat I wasn't told."
He leaned back in his chair and sucked at his pipe, and then he began his story with a curious detached air, as though he were surveying his own handiwork from the point of view of an impartial connoisseur.
"The idea was distinctly ingenious," said he, "and I think I may also venture to claim for it a little originality. I won't trouble you with the machinery by which we learn things. It's enough to mention that among the little things we did learn was the fact that the minister of this parish had left for another charge, and that the parishioners were choosing his successor after the Scottish custom—by hearing a number of candidates each preach a trial sermon." He broke off and asked, "Do you happen to have heard of Schumann?"
"You don't mean the great Schumann?"
"I mean a certain gentleman engaged in the same quiet line of business as myself. He is known of course under another name in England, where he is considered a very fine specimen of John Bull at his best—a jovial, talkative, commercial gentleman with nice spectacles like Mr Pickwick, who subscribes to all the war charities and is never tired of telling his friends what he would do with the Kaiser if he caught him."
I laughed aloud at this happy description of a typical John Bull.
"Well," he continued, "I suggested to Schumann the wild idea—as it seemed to us at first—of getting into the islands in the guise of a candidate for the parish of Myredale. Two days later Schumann came to me with his spectacles twinkling with excitement.
"'Look at this!' said he.
"He showed me a photograph in an illustrated paper. It was the portrait of a certain Mr Alexander Burnett, minister of a parish in the south of Scotland, and I assure you that if the name 'Adolph Tiel' had been printed underneath, none of my friends would have questioned its being my own portrait.
"'The stars are fighting for us!' said Schumann.