mall
choir in the chancel. He was great in epitaphs. A favourite one, which
he would recite _ore rotunda_, was:

"Let this record, what few vain marbles can,
Here lies an honest man."

Another, which, by the way, is in Egton churchyard, ran as follows:

"Life is but a winter's day;
Some breakfast and away,
Others to dinner stop and are full fed,
The oldest man but sups and goes to bed."

He was a genuine old Dalesman of a type passed away. His spirits really
never survived the abolition of the stringed instruments in the western
gallery with its galaxy of village musicians. "I hugged bass fiddle for
many a year," he once told me. Peace be to his memory.

* * * * *

Canon Atkinson tells of his good and harmless but "feckless" parish
clerk and schoolmaster at Danby, whom, when about to take a funeral, he
discovered sitting in the sunny embrasure of the west window, with his
hat on, of course, and comfortably smoking his pipe. The clerk was a
brother of the old vicar of Danby, and they seem to have been a curious
and irreverent pair. The historian of Danby, in his _Forty Years in a
Moorland Parish_, fully describes his first visit to the clerk's school,
and the strange custom of weird singing at funerals to which Mr.
Jenkins alludes.

* * * * *

Another north-country clerk-schoolmaster was obliged to relinquish his
scholastic duties and make way for a certified teacher. One day he heard
the new master tell his pupils: "'A' is an indefinite article. 'A' is
one, and can only be applied to one thing. You cannot say a cats or a
dogs; but only a cat, a dog." The clerk at once reported the matter to
his rector. "Here's a pretty fellow you've got to keep school! He says
that you can only apply the article 'a' to nouns of the singular number;
and here have I been singing 'A--men' all my life, and your reverence
has never once corrected me."

* * * * *

Communicated by Mrs. Williamson, Lydgate Vicarage:

The old parish clerk of Radcliffe was secretary of the races committee,
and would hurry out of church to attend these meetings. Mr. Foxley, the
rector, was told of this weakness of his clerk, so one Wednesday
evening, when the rector knew there was a meeting, he got into the
pulpit (a three-decker was then in the church), and began his sermon.
Half an hour went by, then the clerk began to be rest