e wall.
The choir clamber up into the gallery with their instruments--a
violoncello, a clarinet and a trombone. I see them and soon I hear them,
for there is a hymn before the service, a wild strain, a remnant, if I
mistake not, of some pre-Reformation litany. I have heard what I believe
was its remote musical progenitor in the church of SS. Giovanni e Paolo
at Venice not five years since; and again I have heard it far away in mid-
Atlantic upon a grey sea-Sabbath in June, when neither winds nor waves
are stirring, so that the emigrants gather on deck, and their plaintive
psalm goes forth upon the silver haze of the sky, and on the wilderness
of a sea that has sighed till it can sigh no longer. Or it may be heard
at some Methodist Camp Meeting upon a Welsh hillside, but in the churches
it is gone for ever. If I were a musician I would take it as the subject
for the _adagio_ in a Wesleyan symphony.

Gone now are the clarinet, the violoncello and the trombone, wild
minstrelsy as of the doleful creatures in Ezekiel, discordant, but
infinitely pathetic. Gone is that scarebabe stentor, that bellowing bull
of Bashan the village blacksmith, gone is the melodious carpenter, gone
the brawny shepherd with the red hair, who roared more lustily than all,
until they came to the words, "Shepherds with your flocks abiding," when
modesty covered him with confusion, and compelled him to be silent, as
though his own health were being drunk. They were doomed and had a
presentiment of evil, even when first I saw them, but they had still a
little lease of choir life remaining, and they roared out

[wick-ed hands have pierced and nailed him, pierced and nailed him to
a tree.]

but no description can give a proper idea of the effect. When I was last
in Battersby church there was a harmonium played by a sweet-looking girl
with a choir of school children around her, and they chanted the
canticles to the most correct of chants, and they sang Hymns Ancient and
Modern; the high pews were gone, nay, the very gallery in which the old
choir had sung was removed as an accursed thing which might remind the
people of the high places, and Theobald was old, and Christina was lying
under the yew trees in the churchyard.

But in the evening later on I saw three very old men come chuckling out
of a dissenting chapel, and surely enough they were my old friends the
blacksmith, the carpenter and the shepherd. There was a look of content
upon t