hades of vulgar errors. So it is not surprising that I recall
with a fond sadness Shepperton Church as it was in the old days, with its
outer coat of rough stucco, its red-tiled roof, its heterogeneous windows
patched with desultory bits of painted glass, and its little flight of
steps with their wooden rail running up the outer wall, and leading to
the school-children's gallery.

Then inside, what dear old quaintnesses! which I began to look at with
delight, even when I was so crude a members of the congregation, that my
nurse found it necessary to provide for the reinforcement of my
devotional patience by smuggling bread-and-butter into the sacred
edifice. There was the chancel, guarded by two little cherubims looking
uncomfortably squeezed between arch and wall, and adorned with the
escutcheons of the Oldinport family, which showed me inexhaustible
possibilities of meaning in their blood-red hands, their death's-heads
and cross-bones, their leopards' paws, and Maltese crosses. There were
inscriptions on the panels of the singing-gallery, telling of
benefactions to the poor of Shepperton, with an involuted elegance of
capitals and final flourishes, which my alphabetic erudition traced with
ever-new delight. No benches in those days; but huge roomy pews, round
which devout church-goers sat during 'lessons', trying to look anywhere
else than into each other's eyes. No low partitions allowing you, with a
dreary absence of contrast and mystery, to see everything at all moments;
but tall dark panels, under whose shadow I sank with a sense of
retirement through the Litany, only to feel with more intensity my burst
into the conspicuousness of public life when I was made to stand up on
the seat during the psalms or the singing. And the singing was no
mechanical affair of official routine; it had a drama. As the moment of
psalmody approached, by some process to me as mysterious and untraceable
as the opening of the flowers or the breaking-out of the stars, a slate
appeared in front of the gallery, advertising in bold characters the
psalm about to be sung, lest the sonorous announcement of the clerk
should still leave the bucolic mind in doubt on that head. Then followed
the migration of the clerk to the gallery, where, in company with a
bassoon, two key-bugles, a carpenter understood to have an amazing power
of singing 'counter', and two lesser musical stars, he formed the
complement of a choir regarded in Shepperton as one of