There was a brand-new bronze tablet—somewhat of a relief after the black-edged marble mementoes of the rest of the Hutchins family—to the memory of Mary Gascoyne, the beloved wife of Henry Gascoyne, incumbent of the parish, with a space for the name of the Reverend Henry when he should be carried, by a power stronger than his own, from the comforts of Lye Rectory to that land, the glories and happinesses of which he expatiated upon every Sunday, but which he was in no hurry to set out for. The Reverend Henry was none of your new-fangled parsons who carry the teachings of the New Testament uncomfortably into private life. As for testing social conditions from the Book of Books, it had never entered his head. Christianity was an ideal, and you were to get as near to it as possible. As parson, the only difference between himself and his parishioners lay in the fact that it was incumbent upon him to preserve a greater staidness of demeanour than the neighbouring gentry. Not that he was nearly as staid and solemn as his brother-in-law, Sir Robert Hutchins, who sat in the family pew on Sunday mornings and evenings, a monument of respectability and convention. Neither, judging by the somewhat florid colouring of his face, did the Reverend Henry hold with temperance doctrines. Indeed, I heard that this matter caused some dispute between him and Sir Robert Hutchins, and that the brothers-in-law were not on the best of terms. It pleased Sir Robert Hutchins to hold a sort of informal service in the village schoolroom every Sunday afternoon, when those who were of a Methodistical turn of mind could hold forth and give addresses and so work off their schismatic steam. Sir Robert was of opinion that the Reverend Henry should have fallen into line with his truly statesmanlike scheme, but the Reverend Henry was in the habit of spending his Sunday afternoon with his port, gazing sleepily from his long dining-room windows across the pleasant Lincolnshire landscape, and he informed his brother-in-law that he was not sure that loyalty to the church would permit him to sit and listen to the outpourings of Mr. Butt, the carpenter, or Mr. Shingle, the village grocer; and that a really well thought out and carefully delivered sermon was a greater strain than his brother-in-law had any conception of. He declared that it very often took the whole afternoon before his nerves had fully recovered from the effort. At this Sir Robert murmured something about clergymen being always so ready to take care of those bodies which they taught other people to despise. Then the Reverend Henry grew mightily offended, and replied with cutting sarcasm that he knew that Nonconformity usually had a contempt for the appointed ministers of the church, but that if his brother-in-law wished to show his contempt he had better withdraw to West Lye on Sundays, where there was enough irreverent and blasphemous Psalm-singing and taking of the Lord’s name