Will smiled, though humour was as far as ever from Caleb’s intentions. Unwilling to desert the old man, and perhaps weighing the improbability of an electric stroke against the certainty of spoiling his jacket, and the last surviving sheen of his boots, Will stood pluckily beside his parent, while, after another celestial salvo, great drops began to patter on the leaves and even to drip through them. “Lucky that thunder dedn’t come in the middle o’ last night,” mused the old man gratefully as it roared on. “It’s sech a bother dressin’ yourself agen to set up till it stops. Hark at they Tommy Devils squealin’,” he cried, indicating the startled swifts. But after a few minutes Caleb’s patience gave out: the distant chiming of Chipstone Church bells, with which the way had been piously enlivened, was now chillingly inaudible; the thought that they would be late for chapel gnawed at his heart; and dryness seemed a poor equivalent for those missed moments of spiritual ecstasy. He was about to dash through the storm, when the rain ceased as suddenly as it came, the blackbirds began to whistle and forage merrily, and the sun, bursting out more brilliantly than ever, soon licked up the modicum of moisture that had percolated to their Sunday exterior. But Caleb’s apprehensions were justified. He had overrated the pace of his aged legs, and despite the gain through Plashy Walk, he got no compensation for the missed Half-Way Service, for when they arrived at the little meeting-house, the Morning Service proper had begun. II The chapel of the Peculiars was one of the minor religious edifices that did not aspire to the High Street. Behind an iron gate and a petty stone courtyard, it displayed a gabled front, with a roof of pantiles, and a row of dull windows of an ecclesiastical order on either side. As Will passed through the door, all his tardily born sympathy vanished, and a wave of the old insufferable boredom smote him like a breath of the steerage on his Atlantic steamer. Almost ere his hat was off, his eye had taken in the whole once-familiar scene, the painfully crude walls, a little dingier with the passing of the years, the broad table-desk at the head of the hall, at which Deacon Mawhood and the Elders throned it in Sunday black, the rows of spruce wooden chairs sexually divided by a gangway, and exhibiting in its left section a desert of elderly females with a few oases of hobbledehoy girls. He thought of St. Paul’s Cathedral, and calculated whimsically that if that cost twopence to see, how much ought one not to pay to escape seeing this!