Mr. Eversley, ever since he was appointed vicar, had been troubled in mind by certain established and apparently immutable local practices, against which he waged war long and valiantly, but with less result than his courage and persistency deserved. For instance, it was a rule of the village, and had always been so within the memory of the oldest parishioner (though nobody justified it, nobody could tell how it had grown up), that the men and women, and the boys and girls too, should sit on opposite sides of the church. Whatever the origin of this ritualistic rule had been at Kestercham, it was certainly not ritualism. Mr. Eversley argued that husbands and wives should sit together; he preached upon the propriety of husbands and wives sitting together; he went so far as to call upon some members of his flock, and to beg that they would sit together. They assented, or seemed to assent; but on the next Sunday they were not in church, and on the Sunday after they were sitting on opposite sides. Nothing is so hard to change, in the country especially, as a thoroughly irrational custom; it is proof against all the resources of civilisation. The males and females of Kestercham had always, it was whispered, sat apart, and apart it seemed that they would always sit. Another practice which greatly exercised Mr. Eversley’s mind was this. It was the habit of the farmers and labourers, or of a considerable number of them, to seat themselves in the church porch half an hour or more before the beginning of divine service, and, while sitting there, to discuss secular parochial affairs in strident tones, and sometimes to smoke, until the clerk ceased tolling the solitary bell, and Miss Seaford, the farmer’s daughter, began playing a hymn-tune, which served as a voluntary, upon the harmonium; then they would come into the church by two and two according to a rough but recognised order of precedence, all alike dressed in their best Sunday clothes, and would follow Mr. Eversley, like the mutes in procession at a funeral, up the church until they dropped into their various places on the south (or masculine) side of the church, the most important of the farmers sitting nearest to the chancel, and Mr. Seaford himself, in virtue of his churchwardenship, in a large pew immediately under the pulpit. It was rumoured that in Mr. Eversley’s early days at Kestercham two or three of the parishioners had been known to sit in the porch, enjoying the gossip, until he emerged in his surplice from behind the curtain, and then, instead of entering the church, had retired to meditate and smoke in the fields during the hours of divine service. But this must, I think, be a calumny. Nothing was more curious or characteristic of Kestercham, and nothing was a source of greater trouble to Mr. Eversley, than the extreme suspiciousness with which any stranger who might happen to enter the church while divine service was going on, was regarded by the whole congregation.