The minister walked straight into the pulpit from the outer door, and the service began with the clerk giving out the hymn in a thin, feeble, snuffling voice, and, lest any of the congregation had not caught the number, assisted their memories by writing it in chalk on a slate, and suspending it from a nail from the pulpit over his head; the rubbing out of this chalk, ready for the next hymn, occupying a good deal of his time and attention during the succeeding prayer. The music was a bassoon and a violoncello, with a pitchpipe to enable them to start fair, and the singing was confided to the congregation in general. The doors and windows were left open in summer, for no sound could enter more disturbing than the twitter of a bird or the bleat of a lamb. Flies came buzzing in, or a bee hummed her way round, and perhaps settled in one of the posies carried on Sundays by the country girls, and esteemed a sovereign remedy against sleeping during service. It would be difficult to sleep anywhere with such a rich combination of sight and scent as those nosegays of lad's-love and thyme, wall flowers, pinks, and roses. The graveyard was grassy, still, and peaceful; not a gravel walk up to the door; all was grass, silent and calm. The weekly worshippers held it in affectionate reverence, for there they had laid their own kindred, and there they expected to be laid in turn. After service the congregation dispersed seriously and quietly; those who lived in the same direction walking together, discussing the sermon or enquiring after each other's affairs; but all in a hushed, subdued tone that belongs to Sunday in the country. I could fancy there was a stillness in the air peculiar to the day, as if all nature, animate and inanimate, rested the one day in seven, and worshipped in reverential silence." The chapel of Rivington, with which the memory of the Willoughbys is so closely associated, presents a venerable aspect, though it has no very great antiquity to boast of. At the passing of the Act of Uniformity, Samuel Newton, who had been minister of the Episcopal Chapel, withdrew, but returning some time after and his place remaining unoccupied, he was allowed "to preach in the church without disturbance." When the Conventicle Act was in force the good people of the place frequently assembled to celebrate public worship in the open air at a place called Winter-hill, a part of the mountainous ridge of which Rivington Pike forms so prominent a feature. Seats were cut out of the side of the hill so as to form a kind of amphitheatre, and in the centre a stone pulpit was erected from whence the assembled throng were usually addressed.