The very next Lord's Day my father and mother, Mary, and myself, with Martha and 'Siah, must go to Powle Moor in the afternoon to hear a discourse by Mr. Webster, my father and I walking side by side, a thing which I liked not so much as to walk with Mary. But it chanced that on this very Sabbath my father explained to me what I had often pondered upon, why we should trudge a good two miles across the moor by a rude footpath to the Baptist Meeting House, when the Church lay on a broad and good road almost at our feet, and we had there a large pew, our own freehold, which had been used aforetime by my grandfather and my great-grandfather. Whatever the reason was it had not been apprehended by our old collie, for such is the sway of long habit, that every Sunday when the cracked bell chimed for morning service at the church, it would rise from the hearth, yawn, and stretch itself, look about it as though enquiringly and reproachfully, and then sedately descending the hill, would enter the church, walk decorously to the old pew, now generally empty, and stretch itself by the door, in the aisle. Nor, I confess, was I much wiser than the old dog, for my father's explanation of our desertion of the church of our fathers. "You see, Ben," he said to me, when pressed on the point, speaking slowly, for he breathed with some difficulty in our way up the hill,--"you see, blood is thicker than water." Now this is a truth there is no gainsaying. "And I shall allus hold," continued my father, "I shall allus hold 'at Parson Wilson had no reight to stir th' magistrates up to refuse th' license to th' 'Silent Woman' because some o' th' Baptists 'at belonged to th' Nook Chapel used to go theer o' wet neets to sing an' pray an' expound for mutual edification, an' if one or two on 'em did happen tak' too mich ale at times, it's well known talkin's dry wark. Then about them hens o' your mother's half-cousin, Sammy Sutcliffe, Sam-o'-Sall's. Tha' knows it were agin all natur' for Parson Wilson to gi' it in as he did, an' it were but nateral we should side wi' our own kin." Now it was about these hens I wished to learn, for it was because of them that it has ever been said that schism was hatched in Slaithwaite--that th' dissenters layed away like Hannah Garside's hens, and had laid away ever since.