m the
pulpit, and Smirke's mild head and forehead curl peered over the great
prayer-book in the desk!

The Fairoaks folks were constant at the old church; their servants had
a pew, so had the Doctor's, so had Wapshot's, and those of Misses
Finucane's establishment, three maids and a very nice-looking young man
in a livery. The Wapshot Family were numerous and faithful. Glanders and
his children regularly came to church: so did one of the apothecaries.
Mrs. Pybus went, turn and turn about, to the Low Town church, and to the
Abbey: the Charity School and their families of course came; Wapshot's
boys made a good cheerful noise, scuffling with their feet as they
marched into church and up the organ-loft stair, and blowing their noses
a good deal during the service. To be brief, the congregation looked as
decent as might be in these bad times. The Abbey Church was furnished
with a magnificent screen, and many hatchments and heraldic tombstones.
The Doctor spent a great part of his income in beautifying his darling
place; he had endowed it with a superb painted window, bought in the
Netherlands, and an organ grand enough for a cathedral.

But in spite of organ and window, in consequence of the latter very
likely, which had come out of a Papistical place of worship and
was blazoned all over with idolatry, Clavering New Church prospered
scandalously in the teeth of Orthodoxy; and many of the Doctor's
congregation deserted to Mr. Simcoe and the honourable woman his wife.
Their efforts had thinned the very Ebenezer hard by them, which building
before Simcoe's advent used to be so full, that you could see the backs
of the congregation squeezing out of the arched windows thereof. Mr.
Simcoe's tracts fluttered into the doors of all the Doctor's cottages,
and were taken as greedily as honest Mrs. Portman's soup, with the
quality of which the graceless people found fault. With the folks at the
Ribbon Factory situated by the weir on the Brawl side, and round which
the Low Town had grown, Orthodoxy could make no way at all. Quiet
Miss Myra was put out of court by impetuous Mrs. Simcoe and her female
aides-de-camp. Ah, it was a hard burthen for the Doctor's lady to
bear, to behold her husband's congregation dwindling away; to give
the precedence on the few occasions when they met to a notorious
low-churchman's wife who was the daughter of an Irish Peer; to know that
there was a party in Clavering, their own town of Clavering, on which