What was agate of Pazon Ewan? Had he forgotten that he had to preach that morning? Blind Kerry wanted to know if some of the men craythurs shouldn't just take a slieu round to the ould Ballamona and wake him up, as the saying is; but Mr. Quirk, in more "gintale" phraseology, as became his scholastic calling, gave it out as probable that the young pazon had only been making a "little deetower" after breakfast, and gone a little too far. Still the bell rang, and the uneasy shuffling in the pews grew more noticeable. Presently, in the middle of an abridged movement of the iron tongue in the loft, the head and shoulders of Will-as-Thorn appeared in the opening of the green curtain that divided the porch from the body of the chapel, and the parish clerk beckoned to Hommy-beg. Shambling to his feet and down the aisle, Hommy obeyed the summons, and then, amid yet more vigorous bobbing together of many heads in the pews, the schoolmaster, not to be eclipsed at a moment of public excitement, got up also and followed the gardener into the porch. The whispering had risen to a sibilant hiss that deadened even the bell's loud clangor when little Jabez Gawne himself felt a call to rise and go out after the others. All this time the Bishop sat motionless in the chancel, his head down, his face rather paler than usual, his whole figure somewhat weak and languid, as if continued suffering in silence and in secret had at length taken the power of life out of him. Presently the bell stopped suddenly, and almost instantly little Jabez, with a face as sharp as a pen, came back to his pew, and Mr. Quirk also returned to his place, shaking his head meantime with portentous gravity. A moment later Will-as-Thorn appeared inside the communion-rail, having put on his coat and whipped the lash comb through his hair, which now hung like a dozen of wet dip-candles down his forehead straight for his eyes. The dull buzz of gossip ceased, all was dead silence in the chapel, and many necks were craned forward as Will-as-Thorn was seen to go up to the Bishop and speak to him. Listening without much apparent concern, the Bishop nodded his head once or twice, then rose immediately and walked to the reading-desk. Almost at the same moment Will-as-Thorn took his seat over the clock in the little west gallery, and straightway the service began. The choir sang the psalm which they had practised at the parish church the evening before--"It is good for me that I have been in trouble, that I may learn thy statutes." For the first of his lessons the Bishop read the story of Eli and of Samuel, and of the taking by the Philistines of the ark of the covenant of God. His voice was deep and measured, and when he came to read of the death of Eli's sons, and of how the bad news was brought to Eli, his voice softened and all but broke. "And there ran a man of Benjamin out of the army, and came to Shiloh the same day with his clothes rent, and with earth upon his head.