This was a change for the worse, and what had been a melancholy dirge became a haphazard scramble for notes, each boy seizing on the one that he could detect among the enveloping flourishes, regardless whether it was the same note that had found favour with his neighbour. In the end the hymn became a sacrilegious fugue, devoid of time, harmony or sequence. Yet Joseph was never disquieted at the result. On the contrary, he regarded it as a tribute to his skill, addressing his choir at the finish as a general might address his discomfited troops: “You’ve done your best, and none of us can’t do no more. Better luck at church-time, and this I do say, that ’tis few players can overlay a melody as I can wi’ flourishes and expect them as sings it to pick out the tune.” But to return to our Rector. The fun began (I write, remember, as a boy of ten) with the First Lesson. When the time for it approached, great preparations were seen to be in progress. Our benevolent Archbishop retired into the recesses of the reading desk (a high, square pew, scarcely to be differentiated from our own) and disposed his lunch in orderly array upon the sill overhanging my father’s head. And, to give time for its consumption, a boy was summoned from the congregation—usually it was his own son, a curly-pated lad of thirteen—to discourse the Lesson. Manfully he grappled with the difficulties and hard names of the Old Testament—sticking and halting at nothing, and making a record of false quantities and mispronunciations that I have never heard beaten during a twenty years’ experience of the average undergraduate. Meanwhile his father lunched peacefully, careless what havoc he made with the Kings of Israel and Judah. But woe betide the boy if ever he tried to skip a name. A guttural rebuke issued from the depths of the reading desk: “None of that, Jack; go back, my lad, and try it again.”