“That’s because you had always a drop in them,” said the invalid, with a spiteful sneer, which the contraction of approaching death stiffened into a hideous grin.--“Here,--is not there one of you that’s gnashing and howling there, that can get up a prayer to keep me from it?” So adjured, one of the women offered her services; and of her it might truly be said, as of the “most desartless man of the watch” in Dogberry’s time, that “her reading and writing came by nature;” for she never had been at school, and had never before seen or opened a Protestant prayer book in her life; nevertheless, on she went, and with more emphasis than good discretion, read nearly through the service for the “churching of women;” which in our prayer-books following that of the burial of the dead, she perhaps imagined was someway connected with the state of the invalid. She read with great solemnity,--it was a pity that two interruptions occurred during the performance, one from old Melmoth, who, shortly after the commencement of the prayers, turned towards the old housekeeper, and said, in a tone scandalously audible, “Go down and draw the niggers of the kitchen fire closer, and lock the door, and let me _hear it locked_. I can’t mind any thing till that’s done.” The other was from John Melmoth gliding into the room, hearing the inappropriate words uttered by the ignorant woman, taking quietly as he knelt beside her the prayer-book from her hands, and reading in a suppressed voice part of that solemn service which, by the forms of the Church of England, is intended for the consolation of the departing.