One day when Captain Maumbry entered his wife's drawing-room, filled with hired furniture, she thought he was somebody else, for he had not come upstairs humming the most catching air afloat in musical circles or in his usual careless way. 'What's the matter, Jack?' she said without looking up from a note she was writing. 'Well--not much, that I know.' 'O, but there is,' she murmured as she wrote. 'Why--this cursed new lath in a sheet--I mean the new parson! He wants us to stop the band-playing on Sunday afternoons.' Laura looked up aghast. 'Why, it is the one thing that enables the few rational beings hereabouts to keep alive from Saturday to Monday!' 'He says all the town flock to the music and don't come to the service, and that the pieces played are profane, or mundane, or inane, or something--not what ought to be played on Sunday. Of course 'tis Lautmann who settles those things.' Lautmann was the bandmaster. The barrack-green on Sunday afternoons had, indeed, become the promenade of a great many townspeople cheerfully inclined, many even of those who attended in the morning at Mr. Sainway's service; and little boys who ought to have been listening to the curate's afternoon lecture were too often seen rolling upon the grass and making faces behind the more dignified listeners. Laura heard no more about the matter, however, for two or three weeks, when suddenly remembering it she asked her husband if any further objections had been raised. 'O--Mr. Sainway. I forgot to tell you. I've made his acquaintance. He is not a bad sort of man.' Laura asked if either Maumbry or some others of the officers did not give the presumptuous curate a good setting down for his interference. 'O well--we've forgotten that. He's a stunning preacher, they tell me.' The acquaintance developed apparently, for the Captain said to her a little later on, 'There's a good deal in Sainway's argument about having no band on Sunday afternoons. After all, it is close to his church. But he doesn't press his objections unduly.' 'I am surprised to hear you defend him!' 'It was only a passing thought of mine. We naturally don't wish to offend the inhabitants of the town if they don't like it.' 'But they do.' The invalid in the oriel never clearly gathered the details of progress in this conflict of lay and clerical opinion; but so it was that, to the disappointment of musicians, the grief of out-walking lovers, and the regret of the junior population of the town and country round, the band- playing on Sunday afternoons ceased in Casterbridge barrack-square.