ng trackers, but took away with him an harmonious
memory of sunlight and coloured glass and eighteenth-century music; and
perhaps of some clear treble voice, for Mr Sharnall was famed for
training boys and discovering the gift of song.

Saint Luke's little summer, in the October that followed the
commencement of the restoration, amply justified its name. In the
middle of the month there were several days of such unusual beauty as to
recall the real summer, and the air was so still and the sunshine so
warm that anyone looking at the soft haze on Cullerne Flat might well
have thought that August had returned.

Cullerne Minster was, as a rule, refreshingly cool in the warmth of
summer, but something of the heat and oppressiveness of the outside air
seemed to have filtered into the church on these unseasonably warm
autumn days. On a certain Saturday a more than usual drowsiness marked
the afternoon service. The choir plumped down into their places when
the Psalms were finished, and abandoned themselves to slumber with
little attempt at concealment, as Mr Noot began the first lesson.
There were, indeed, honourable exceptions to the general somnolence. On
the cantoris side the worn-out alto held an animated conversation with
the cracked tenor. They were comparing some specially fine onions under
the desk, for both were gardeners and the autumn leek-show was near at
hand. On the decani side Patrick Ovens, a red-haired little treble, was
kept awake by the necessity for altering _Magnificat_ into _Magnified
Cat_ in his copy of Aldrich in G.

The lesson was a long one. Mr Noot, mildest and most beneficent of
men, believed that he was at his best in denunciatory passages of
Scripture. The Prayer-Book, it was true, had appointed a portion of the
Book of Wisdom for the afternoon lesson, but Mr Noot made light of
authorities, and read instead a chapter from Isaiah. If he had been
questioned as to this proceeding, he would have excused himself by
saying that he disapproved of the Apocrypha, even for instruction of
manners (and there was no one at Cullerne at all likely to question this
right of private judgment), but his real, though perhaps unconscious,
motive was to find a suitable passage for declamation. He thundered
forth judgments in a manner which combined, he believed, the terrors of
supreme justice with an infinite commiseration for the blindness of
errant, but long-forgotten peoples. He had, in fact, that "Bible