“Be off, if you are he!” the parson cried; “or bow your back to the pillars, as Samson did, that God’s defiled house may overwhelm you all together!” But Monjoy’s own rage and remorse were so apparent, and he besought the parson so movingly for one minute in which he himself might restore order, that the parson cried, “I give you three minutes, then; but if so much as a whisper reaches my ears----” Monjoy was gone. Before the parson had fairly turned back, the engraver, coiner, forger, unlicensed smelter of metals, was in the clerk’s desk and Pim o’ Cuddy was pitched into the arms of the horde below. As he stood there, it was hardly too much to say of him that he looked a king, a barbarian king of some older time, who made laws with his eye and executed them with his hand. “Have you done?” he roared. At his wrathful voice the tumult fell. “Take those caps off!” There was a movement, every cap was removed, and Monjoy’s head moved arrogantly from side to side. “Now. He who moves hand or foot settles with me. When the words ‘Let us pray’ are pronounced, you will kneel, and you will remain kneeling till the Amen. There’s none here who doesn’t know me; he doesn’t know me who doesn’t do this. When _my_ head bows and _my_ knee bends, by this house and its Master, yours shall!” A moment longer he stood in the desk, and then left it amid such a silence that the calling of the sheep away by the dam could be heard. They fell from before him as he passed out of the church again; he reappeared alone at the altar, his back to the congregation. Presently Cicely and James Eastwood appeared, the parson following. The now familiar service was brief. Obediently as children, docile and uncomprehending as children, Back o’ th’ Mooin knelt for the prayer. An Amen or two, well-nigh forgotten, rose to lips as the parson ceased; and then they rose again. The parson gave out a couple of verses of a hymn; only Pim o’ Cuddy and a few others sang it, but all stood in imitative attitudes of reverence, just as at the pieceboards they had imitated gestures of ridicule and derision. They passed out of the church and put on their caps again, and the chief actors entered the vestry where the registers were.