in tolerably close companionship. I could
almost grudge that beautiful Gothic church to those regular red-brick
uniform rows of deformity.'

'I do not think even the new church can boast of more beauty than St.
Mary's,' said Anne.

'No, and it wants the handiwork of that best artist, old Time,' said
Elizabeth; 'it will be long before Queen Victoria's head on the corbel
at the new church is of as good a colour as Queen Eleanor's at the old
one, and we never shall see anything so pretty at St. Austin's as the
yellow lichen cap, and plume of spleen-wort feathers, which Edward the
First wears.'

'How beautiful the old church tower is!' said Anne, turning round to
look at it; 'and the gable ends of your house, and the tall trees of
the garden, with the cloistered alms-houses, have still quite a
monastic air.'

'If you only look at the tower with its intersecting arches and their
zig-zag mouldings,' said Elizabeth, 'and shut your eyes to our kitchen
chimney, on which rests all the fame of the Vicar before last.'

'What can you mean?' said Anne.

'That when anyone wishes to distinguish the Reverend Hugh Puddington
from all other Vicars of Abbeychurch, his appellation is "The man that
built the kitchen chimney."'

'That being, I suppose, the only record he has left behind him,' said
Anne.

'The only one now existing,' said Elizabeth, 'since Papa has made his
great horrid pew in the chancel into open seats.--Do not you remember
it, Kate? and how naughty you used to be, when Margaret left off
sitting there with us, and there was no one to see what we were
about--oh! and there is a great fat Patience on a monument on the wall
over our heads, and a very long inscription, recording things quite as
unsuitable to a clergyman.'

'I do not understand you, Lizzie,' said Helen; 'unsuitable as what?
Patience, or building chimneys, or making pews?'

'Patience is a virtue when she is not on a monument,' said Elizabeth.

'And neither pews nor chimneys can be unsuitable to a clergyman,' said
little Dora; 'there are four pews in the new church, and Papa built a
chimney for the school.'

Everyone laughed, much to Dora's surprise, and somewhat to Helen's, and
Elizabeth was forced to explain, for Dora's edification, that what she
intended by the speech in question, was only that it was unsuitable to
a clergyman to leave no record behind him, but what had been intended
to gratify his own love of luxury.

'I am sorry I said anyth