ut
merely a Bible. The person who tells these things was not present at
that service, but he soon learnt that the young curate was nothing less
than a great surprise to his congregation; a mixed one always, for though
the Hussars occupied the body of the building, its nooks and corners were
crammed with civilians, whom, up to the present, even the least
uncharitable would have described as being attracted thither less by the
services than by the soldiery.

Now there arose a second reason for squeezing into an already overcrowded
church. The persuasive and gentle eloquence of Mr. Sainway operated like
a charm upon those accustomed only to the higher and dryer styles of
preaching, and for a time the other churches of the town were thinned of
their sitters.

At this point in the nineteenth century the sermon was the sole reason
for churchgoing amongst a vast body of religious people. The liturgy was
a formal preliminary, which, like the Royal proclamation in a court of
assize, had to be got through before the real interest began; and on
reaching home the question was simply: Who preached, and how did he
handle his subject? Even had an archbishop officiated in the service
proper nobody would have cared much about what was said or sung. People
who had formerly attended in the morning only began to go in the evening,
and even to the special addresses in the afternoon.

One day when Captain Maumbry entered his wife's drawing-room, filled with
hired furniture, she thought he was somebody else, for he had not come
upstairs humming the most catching air afloat in musical circles or in
his usual careless way.

'What's the matter, Jack?' she said without looking up from a note she
was writing.

'Well--not much, that I know.'

'O, but there is,' she murmured as she wrote.

'Why--this cursed new lath in a sheet--I mean the new parson! He wants
us to stop the band-playing on Sunday afternoons.'

Laura looked up aghast.

'Why, it is the one thing that enables the few rational beings hereabouts
to keep alive from Saturday to Monday!'

'He says all the town flock to the music and don't come to the service,
and that the pieces played are profane, or mundane, or inane, or
something--not what ought to be played on Sunday. Of course 'tis
Lautmann who settles those things.'

Lautmann was the bandmaster.

The barrack-green on Sunday afternoons had, indeed, become the promenade
of a great many townspeople cheerfully incli