Such then was the position when I parted with the Stools, after the evening meal that I have just recorded. And it was rather with their cries of thanks and gentle admiration resounding through the chill November night than with any sense of impending trouble that I turned my footsteps towards home. Indeed, as I buttoned up my overcoat and drew my scarf over my mouth, I had every reason to feel content both on my own account and my father’s, whose health for some weeks had been slowly improving. For not only had my mother’s parents been safely interred and her eight sisters satisfactorily disposed of, her two aunts competently buried, and Emily Smith junior despatched to Aberdeen, but my father, as I have indicated, had finally established himself as the senior sidesman of St. James-the-Least-of-All. Conferring the right of leading the other sidesmen up the central aisle at the end of the collection, this was the more gratifying since my father had only obtained it as the result of a prolonged and determined struggle, in which his chief opponent had been a retired fishmonger, known as Alexander Carkeek. A northern Caledonian of the most offensive type, this gentleman, as he liked to consider himself, was now a sleeping partner in the firm of Carkeek and Carkeek, fishmongers and poulterers in the Kennington Road, and had long been suspected, both by my father and myself, of a secret addiction to alcohol. Of middle height—he was perhaps taller than my father by an inch and three-quarters or two inches—his abdominal circumference was equally extensive and his bullet-shaped face even more highly coloured. Unlike my father, however, he had signally failed in retaining the bulk of his hair, and even his two sons, Corkran and Cosmo, were showing signs of becoming bald. Sidesmen like their father, they were only less aggressive, and during the long contest for supremacy, they had seized every opportunity of detaining or distracting my father while their own got into position at the head of the line. Indeed on one occasion, when my father had paused for a moment to adjust a door-handle half-way up the aisle, they had deliberately encouraged their father to push himself in front and thereby head the procession. Naturally resenting this, my father had immediately plunged forward, with the painful result that the two of them had become wedged and had been unable, owing to their respective girths, either to advance or retreat. Needless to say, in the struggle that ensued, my father had been the first to break away and had arrived at the chancel half an abdomen ahead of his pertinacious rival. [Illustration: _Alexander Carkeek and his two sons_ ]