red to live in Surrey, and even when he came
over to Ireland for the shooting rarely honoured the church with his
presence. A stone tablet, bearing the name of this magnate's father, a
Cork pawnbroker, who had purchased the property for a small sum under
the Encumbered Estates Court Act, adorned the wall beside the pulpit.
The management of the property was in the hands of a Dublin firm, so
the parish was deprived of the privilege of a resident land agent. The
doctor, recently appointed to the district, was a Roman Catholic of
plebeian antecedents, which reduced the resident gentry of Ballymoy
to the Quinns, a bank manager, and the Rector, Canon Beecher. A few
farmers, Mr. Stack's gamekeeper, and the landlady of the Imperial Hotel,
made up the rest of the congregation.

The service was not of a very attractive or inspiriting kind. Canon
Beecher--his title was a purely honorary one, not even involving the
duty of preaching in the unpretending building which, in virtue of
some forgotten history, was dignified with the name of Killinacoff
Cathedral--read slowly with somewhat ponderous emphasis. His thirty
years in Holy Orders had slightly hardened an originally luscious Dublin
brogue, but there remained a certain gentle aspiration of the _d's_ and
_t's_, and a tendency to omit the labial consonants altogether. He read
an immense number of prayers, gathering, as it seemed to Hyacinth, the
longest ones from the four corners of the Prayer-Book. At intervals he
allowed himself to be interrupted with a hymn, but resumed afterwards
the steady flow of supplication. The eldest Miss Beecher--the Canon had
altogether two daughters and three sons--played a harmonium. The other
girl and the three boys, with the assistance of an uncertain bass from
Mr. Quinn, gave utterance to the congregation's praise. Hyacinth tried
to join in the first hymn, which happened to be familiar to him, but
quavered into silence towards the end of the second verse, discovering
that the eyes of Mrs. Beecher from her pew, of the Canon from the
reading-desk, of the vocal Miss Beecher and her brothers, were fixed
upon him. The sermon proved to be long and uninteresting. It was about
Melchizedek, and was so far appropriate to the Priest and King that it
had no recognisable beginning and need not apparently have ever had an
end. Perhaps no one, unless he were specially trained for the purpose,
could have followed right through the quiet meander-ings of the Canon's