ever they could turn out a psalm, and perhaps
better, not to speak irreverent. In short, one half-hour they could be
playing a Christmas carol in the squire's hall to the ladies and
gentlemen, and drinking tay and coffee with 'em as modest as saints; and
the next, at The Tinker's Arms, blazing away like wild horses with the
"Dashing White Sergeant" to nine couple of dancers and more, and
swallowing rum-and-cider hot as flame.

'Well, this Christmas they'd been out to one rattling randy after another
every night, and had got next to no sleep at all. Then came the Sunday
after Christmas, their fatal day. 'Twas so mortal cold that year that
they could hardly sit in the gallery; for though the congregation down in
the body of the church had a stove to keep off the frost, the players in
the gallery had nothing at all. So Nicholas said at morning service,
when 'twas freezing an inch an hour, "Please the Lord I won't stand this
numbing weather no longer: this afternoon we'll have something in our
insides to make us warm, if it cost a king's ransom."

'So he brought a gallon of hot brandy and beer, ready mixed, to church
with him in the afternoon, and by keeping the jar well wrapped up in
Timothy Thomas's bass-viol bag it kept drinkably warm till they wanted
it, which was just a thimbleful in the Absolution, and another after the
Creed, and the remainder at the beginning o' the sermon. When they'd had
the last pull they felt quite comfortable and warm, and as the sermon
went on--most unfortunately for 'em it was a long one that afternoon--they
fell asleep, every man jack of 'em; and there they slept on as sound as
rocks.

''Twas a very dark afternoon, and by the end of the sermon all you could
see of the inside of the church were the pa'son's two candles alongside
of him in the pulpit, and his spaking face behind 'em. The sermon being
ended at last, the pa'son gie'd out the Evening Hymn. But no choir set
about sounding up the tune, and the people began to turn their heads to
learn the reason why, and then Levi Limpet, a boy who sat in the gallery,
nudged Timothy and Nicholas, and said, "Begin! begin!"

'"Hey? what?" says Nicholas, starting up; and the church being so dark
and his head so muddled he thought he was at the party they had played at
all the night before, and away he went, bow and fiddle, at "The Devil
among the Tailors," the favourite jig of our neighbourhood at that time.
The rest of the band, being in t