the church old and
tumbledown, reeking with damp; the rain came through the roof; the seats
were worm-eaten, and centipedes, with other like vermin, roamed about
them near the wall. The vicar was non-resident, and an elderly
curate-in-charge ministered to this parish and another in the
neighbourhood. The customs of the church were much the same as those
described by Canon Atkinson in his _Forty Years in a Moorland Parish_ as
existing on his arrival at Danby. There was no vestry. The surplice
(washed twice a year) was hung over the altar rails, within which the
curate robed, his hat or any parcel he happened to have in his hand
being put down for the time on the Holy Table. The men sat for the most
part together, the farmers and young men in the singing-loft, the
labourers below, and the women in front. The wife of the chief yeoman
farmer--an excellent and superior woman--still kept up the habit of
"making a reverence" to the altar before she entered her pew. The
surplice, which hung in the church all through the week, was apt to get
very damp. On one occasion, when a strange clergyman staying at the Hall
took the service, he declined to wear it, as it was so wet.

"He wadn't pit it on," said the old clerk Christopher (commonly called
"Kitty") Hill. "I reckon he was afeard o' t' smittle" (infection).

The same clergyman, when he went up to the altar for the Communion
Service, knelt down, as his habit was, at the north end for private
prayer whilst the congregation were singing a metrical Psalm (Old or New
Version). On looking up he saw that Kitty Hill had followed him within
the rails and was kneeling at the opposite end of the Holy Table staring
at him with round eyes full of amazement at this unusual act of
devotion. Both the curate and the clerk spoke the broadest Yorkshire.
Psalm xxxii. 4 was thus rendered by Kitty: "Ma-maasture is like t' doong
i' summer." He was an old man and quite bald, and used to sit in his
desk with a blue-spotted pocket-handkerchief spread over his head,
occasionally drawing down a corner of it for use, and then pulling it
straight again. If the squire happened to come late to church--a thing
which did not often happen--the curate would pause in his reading and
apologise: "Good morning, Mr. ----. I am sorry, sir, that I began the
service. I thought you were not coming this morning." One sentence of
the sermon preached on the death of King William IV long remained in the
memory of some of hi