he singing should
go well or that the choirboys should not fidget. But there was a terrible
confusion with chairs, and a hideous kind of clapper that was used,
apparently, to warn the boys to sit and rise. The service, moreover, as a
reverential congregational act of worship such as he was used to hope
for, was marred by innumerable collections, and especially by the old
woman who came round even during the _Sanctus_ to collect the rent of the
chairs they occupied, and changed money or announced prices with all the
zest of the market-place.

But at the close there was a procession which is worth considerable
description. Six men with censers of silver lined up before the high
altar, and stood there, slowly swinging the fragrant bowls at the end of
their long chains. The music died down. One could hear the rhythmical,
faint clangour of the metal. And then, intensely sudden, away in the west
gallery, but almost as if from the battlements of heaven, pealed out
silver trumpets in a fanfare. The censers flew high in time with it, and
the sweet clouds of smoke, caught by the coloured sunlight of the rich
painted windows, unfolded in the air of the sanctuary. Lights moved and
danced, and the space before the altar filled with the white of the men
and boys who should move in the procession. Again and again those
trumpets rang out, and hardly had the last echoes died away than the
organ thundered the _Pange Lingua_, as a priest in cloth of gold turned
from the altar with the glittering monstrance in his hand. Even from
where he stood Peter could see the white centre of the Host for Whom
all this was enacted. Then the canopy, borne by four French laymen in
frock-coats and white gloves, hid It from his sight; and the high gold
cross, and its attendant tapers, swung round a great buttress into view.

Peter had never heard a hymn sung so before. First the organ would peal
alone; then the men's voices unaided would take up the refrain; then the
organ again; then the clear treble of the boys; then, like waves breaking
on immemorial cliffs, organ, trumpets, boys, men, and congregation would
thunder out together till the blood raced in his veins and his eyes were
too dim to see.

Down the central aisle at last they came, and Peter knelt with the rest.
He saw how the boys went before throwing flowers; how in pairs, as the
censers were recharged, the thurifers walked backward before the three
beneath the canopy, of whom one, white-haire