e time in which
they lived.

When two young people of Catwick or its neighbourhood feel they can live
no longer without each other, they in local phrase "put in the banns."
They then, of course, expect to have them published, or again in local
idiom "thrown over the pulpit." On all such occasions, according to a
very old custom, after the rector had read out the names, with the usual
injunction following, from the middle compartment of the three-decker,
Dixon would rise from his seat below, and slowly and clearly cry out,
"God speed 'em weel" (God speed them well). By this pious wish he prayed
for a blessing on those about to be wed, and in this the congregation
joined, for they responded with Amen.

Dixon was the last of the Catwick clerks to keep this custom. Much more
recently, however, than the time he held office, members of the
congregation, usually those seated in the loft, on the publication of
the banns of some well-known people, have called out the time-honoured
phrase. But it is now heard no more. The custom has gone into a like
oblivion to that of the parish clerk himself, once so important a
person, in his own estimation if in that of no other, both in church and
parish. "The old order changeth."

Thomas Dixon died at Catwick when sixty-seven years of age. He was
buried in the churchyard on January 2, 1833, and by the Rev. John Torre,
the rector he served so faithfully.

When Sydney Smith went to see the out-of-the-way Yorkshire village of
Foston-le-Clay, to which benefice he had been presented, his arrival
occasioned great excitement. The parish clerk came forward to welcome
him, a man eighty years of age, with long grey hair, thread-bare coat,
deep wrinkles, stooping gait, and a crutch stick. He looked at the new
parson for some time from under his grey shaggy eyebrows, and talked,
and showed that age had not quenched the natural shrewdness of the
Yorkshireman.

At last, after a pause, he said, striking his crutch stick on the
ground:

"Master Smith, it often stroikes moy moind that folks as come frae
London be such fools. But you," he added, giving Sydney Smith a nudge
with his stick, "I see you be no fool." The new vicar was gratified.

Yorkshiremen are keen songsters, and _fortissimo_ is their favourite
note of expression. "Straack up a bit, Jock! straack up a bit," a
Yorkshire parson used to shout to his clerk, when he wanted the Old
Hundredth to be sung. Well do I remember a delightful old c