n this 'ere path,
arm-in-arm, of a summer arternoon."

It is recorded of one Thomas Atkins, clerk of Chillenden Church, Kent,
that he used to leave his reading-desk at the commencement of the
General Thanksgiving and proceed to the west gallery, where he gave out
the hymn and sang a duet with the village cobbler, in which the
congregation joined as best they could. He walked very slowly down the
church, and said the Amen at the end of the Thanksgiving wherever he
happened to be, and that was generally half-way up the gallery stairs,
whence his feeble voice, with a good _tremolo_, used to sound like the
distant baaing of a sheep. It was a strange and curious performance.

Miss Rawnsley, of Raithby Hall, Spilsby, gives some delightful
reminiscences of a most original specimen of the race of clerks, old
Haw, who officiated at Halton Holgate, Lincolnshire. He was a curious
mixture of worldly wisdom and strong religious feeling. The former was
exemplified by his greeting to a cousin of my correspondent, just
returned from his ordination.

He said, "Now, Mr. Hardwick, remember thou must creep an' crawl along
the 'edge bottoms, and then tha'ill make thee a bishop."

He was a strong advocate of Fasting Communion. No one ever knew whence
he derived his strong views on the subject. The rector never taught it.
Probably his ideas were derived from some long lingering tradition. When
over seventy years of age he set out fasting to walk six miles to attend
a late celebration at a distant church on the occasion of its
consecration. Nothing would ever induce him to break his fast before
communicating; and on this occasion he was picked up in a dead faint,
his journey being only half completed.

On Wednesdays and Fridays he always went into the church at eleven
o'clock and said the Litany aloud. When asked his reason, he said, "I've
gotten an ungodly wife and two ungodly bairns to pray for, sir." He once
asked one of the rector's daughters to help him in the _Parody_ of the
Psalms he was making; and on another occasion requested to have the old
altar-cloth, which had just been replaced by a new one, "to make a slop
to dig the graves in, and no sacrilege neither."

At Sutton Maddock, Shropshire, there was a clerk who used to read
"_Pe_-li-_can_ in the wilderness," and the usual "_Howl_ in the
_De_sart," and "Teach the _Se_nators wisdom," and when the Litany was
said on Wednesdays and Fridays declared that it was not in his Prayer