Claude and Eustace looked at each other, like those chappies in the poem, with a wild surmise.
“It’s a scheme,” said Claude.
“A jolly brainy scheme,” said Eustace. “I didn’t think you had it in you, Bertie.”
“But even so,” said Claude, “fizzer as that sermon no doubt is, will it be good enough in the face of a four-minute handicap?”
“Rather!” I said. “When I told you it lasted forty-five minutes, I was probably understating it. I should call it—from my recollection of the thing—nearer fifty.”
“Then carry on,” said Claude.
I toddled over in the evening and fixed the thing up. Old Heppenstall was most decent about the whole affair. He seemed pleased and touched that I should have remembered the sermon all these years, and said he had once or twice had an idea of preaching it again, only it had seemed to him, on reflection, that it was perhaps a trifle long for a rustic congregation.
“And in these restless times, my dear Wooster,” he said, “I fear that brevity in the pulpit is becoming more and more desiderated by even the bucolic churchgoer, who one might have supposed would be less afflicted with the spirit of hurry and impatience than his metropolitan brother. I have had many arguments on the subject with my nephew, young Bates, who is taking my old friend Spettigue’s cure over at Gandle-by-the-Hill. His view is that a sermon nowadays should be a bright, brisk, straight-from-the-shoulder address, never lasting more than ten or twelve minutes.”
“Long?” I said. “Why, my goodness! you don’t call that Brotherly Love sermon of yours long, do you?”
“It takes fully fifty minutes to deliver.”