it was founded more than a century before that. A side door
leads you into a grass-grown and quiet enclosure. There are a few
gravestones there, recording, in illegible characters, the piety and
virtues of those who have gone before. At the back of the Meeting-house
is the minister's residence. In the same square resides the pew-opener,
with her little family, who seem fresher and livelier than you would
expect in such a place. Outside rush along the Fenchurch Street trains
to and fro, sometimes with a scream which, as you will by-and-by find,
will drown the preacher's voice. Outside there are factories and
warehouses darkening the air; outside there are heathens--baptized I
daresay, but nevertheless heathens--as complete and entire as any
discovered by Captain Cook; outside go up and down all day the sailors of
every country under heaven, at all times when on shore a disorderly lot,
with a strong tendency to get drunk and quarrel; outside are the
lodging-house keepers, and Jew slop-sellers, and foul women and crimps,
who lie in wait for poor Jack; outside, nightly and daily, on Sundays and
week-days, once a week and all the year round, is the ever-deafening and
ever-growing roar of London life.

On Saturdays this little old-fashioned meeting-house is opened twice a
day. Of sects, as we all know, there are many Lilliputian varieties.
One of the smallest of these is that of the Seventh-day Baptists. In
this country there are two congregations of them; one in Mill Yard, and
one far away in Gloucestershire, where, according to the common proverb,
"God is." At one time they were a sect, as they are I believe at this
time in America. Here, in England, they have dwindled down to two
skeleton congregations, an endowment, and a Chancery suit. As there is
money a form of worship is kept up, though for all practical purposes the
cause is dead. There may be four grown-up persons besides the pew-opener
to form the morning service: there are just as many in the afternoon.
There is no week-evening service. At one time, many, many years ago,
there was a Sunday-school, but the scholars have grown up and moved away,
and none have come to take their vacant places. Inside the door you are
informed there are no pew-rents, no collections. Nevertheless, the
people keep away. In the pulpit is a learned man of an old-fashioned and
almost extinct type, and no one regards him; and yet I must confess there
was to me a fascination