The sermon was to me, as a boy, full of the most delightful interest. It had an infinity of anticipation. No one knew what was coming—least of all the Rector himself. We felt stimulated by the chance of any and every possibility. A clergyman of the strictest sect of the Evangelicals, he always preached in a surplice. (It was in the days, remember, when the Geneva gown was the badge of that school, and the sign of a high church cleric was barely appearing above the horizon). But I sadly fear that our Rector was influenced by no question of principle or non-principle; I cannot, I think, be wronging him if I infer that his preference for the surplice was due to sheer indifference or indolence. Then came the always exciting task of moving the immense Bible from the reading desk to the pulpit. He regarded it, I think, almost in the light of a fetish, and certainly, so long as I knew him, would never have attempted a sermon with any smaller and less trustworthy guide. He balanced the enormous volume in his right hand, and, with his left hand on the rails, steadied himself as he made the painful and perilous ascent. The hope, I fear, of us boys was that the book would one day slip from his hand and imperil the head of the clerk beneath, who was now no longer choirmaster, but, like a Roman flute player, had crossed over to his proper seat and resumed his duties beneath the pulpit. But the hope was never realised, and I have felt ever since that my life has lacked something in consequence. The choice of his text was the longest part of his sermon. The Bible was opened haphazard, as though he intended to execute a sort of _sors Vergiliana_. But so casual a method was quite unsuited to the dignity of our Rector. The pages were turned and re-turned; whole chapters were read and carefully studied, and, after a quarter of an hour of this preliminary investigation, a text was given out, that for glaring irrelevance and disconnection with everything else could never have been surpassed if he had taken it at sight. A name out of a genealogy—the Christian name Mary—Tophet—the daubed wall—pillows for all armholes—are among the subjects that I distinctly remember were selected for our edification. But of the treatment alas! I remember nothing—nothing then, and certainly nothing now, when I would give £50 to trace the exact process of his reasoning. The last sermon I ever heard him deliver was on the text, “And there shall be no more sea”—an unwise and disquieting subject for a congregation, most of whom came of a race of fishermen, and gained their living from the element which he so confidently annihilated. “If there baint no sea, then ’tis no place for I,” I heard a man say to his neighbour as he passed out of church; “and sakes alive, where be ’en going to get their fish from?”