"No: and yet it bore all the marks of an immense age. For to begin with, it had stood five-and-twenty years in this very garden, exposed to all weathers, and the steatite (as they call it) is of all substances the most friable--is, in fact, the stuff used by tailors under the name of French chalk. Again, when, in 1719, my predecessor, old Vicar Hichens, removed it to the church and set it in the south aisle--or, at any rate, when he died and ceased to protect it--the young men of the parish took to using it for a hatstand, and also to carving their own and their sweethearts' names upon it during sermon-time. The figures of the sculpture were two; a youth and a maid, recumbent, and naked but for a web of drapery flung across their middles; and they lay on a roughly carved rock, over which the girl's locks as well as the drapery were made to hang limp, as though dripping with water. . . . One thing more I must tell you, risking derision; that to my ignorance the sculpture proclaimed its age less by these signs of weather and rough usage than by the simplicity of its design, its proportions, the chastity (there's no other word) of the two figures. They were classical, my dear Dick-- what was left of them; Greek, and of the best period." The Senior Tutor lit a fresh pipe, and by the flare of the match I saw his eyes twinkling. "Praxiteles," he jerked out, between the puffs, "and in the age of Kneller! But proceed, my friend." "And do you wait, my scoffer!" The Vicar borrowed the box of matches, lit the candle--which held a steady flame in the still evening air--opened the book, and laid it on his knee while he adjusted his spectacles. "The story is here, entered on a separate leaf of the Register and signed by Vicar Hichens' own hand. With your leave--for it is brief--I am going to read it through to you. The entry is headed:" '_Concerning a group of Statuary now in the S. aisle of Lezardew Parish Church: set there by me in witness of God's Providence in operation, as of the corruption of man's heart, and for a warning to sinners to amend their ways_.