And behind Merridew I can see many, if not most, of his brethren, men of fine instincts and real devotedness--narrow-minded in none but the most literal sense, and in that merely because of the school that has moulded them--men who would cheerfully give all that they possess to be able to influence in any substantial degree the great world's dreamers and doers. And behind them again I can see their Church. * * * * * Curiously enough, we have just been discussing something of all this upon Carthew's Thames-side lawn. We had crossed the river in the morning, and walked up, about a couple of miles, to a neighbouring village church. And now, as I write to you in the boat under the willows, they seem to me--the temple and its service--to have been almost tragically symbolic. The village itself, on the outskirts of Reading, consists of a rustic core, about which time and circumstance have wrapped several red-brick layers, the innermost containing workers from the various shops and factories of the neighbouring town, together with a sprinkling of day-labourers in the country round; and the outer accommodating some superior clerks and their families, a few of the more substantial Reading tradesmen, and the inevitable retired colonel. Most of these, as we passed upon our way, were smoking over the Sunday papers in their front gardens, or preparing for a morning to be spent upon the river; and the church was far from their midst, a mile in fact beyond their extremest outskirts. Moreover the day was hot, and the road to it dusty. The building itself was neither old nor new, and we were shown into a pew beneath a large stained-glass window that almost immediately began, in spite of myself, to monopolise my attention. The congregation consisted, of course, mainly of women. ("It will be the same in the Hereafter," my Aunt Josephine once assured me when commenting upon the same phenomenon.) But there were about thirty men present, for the most part gnarled and sunburnt sons of the field, in uncomfortable, ready-made suits--men, as I guessed, in whose veins there still ran something of the older homage once shared by parson and squire. What was this particular parson going to give them, I wondered, as mental and moral food for the week's sustenance? His delivery of the prayers and lessons was not very promising. It was not that he had any physical impediment in his speech. It was merely that he had never been taught to produce his sounds effectively, and that Oxford and his clubs had successfully schooled him into eliminating any tincture of emotion from their quality. But he might still, of course, have a message in waiting for us from the pulpit.