The result of the Dean's remonstrance was to strengthen the Canon's cause in the eyes of his adherents; and when one of these friends wrote a letter to the newspapers, expressing the opinion that if Canon Mowbray had been guilty of any breach of discipline the ecclesiastical authorities should take action with a view to justifying themselves in the attitude they had assumed in regard to him, the general opinion was that the Canon had triumphed, for the Dean and Chapter knew perfectly well that they had no power to accept the challenge implied in the letter: the question was not one of turning to the east or turning to the west, or of lighting candles in a place where no artificial illuminant was required, or of wearing an overelaborate robe--it was solely a question of taste, and the discipline of the Church has nothing to do with matters of taste. It was at this point that Lady Birnam, who claimed to be a local ecclesiastical seismometer, so to speak, prophesied a cataclysm that would shake the Church to its foundations. She went far beyond the advisory committee of St. Paul's in considering the consequences of making new subways by the London County Council. III.--THE PEACEMAKERS And yet within a couple of months the last rumble of the threatened disturbance had passed away. This is how the _status quo ante bellum_ was restored: The offending Canon was in the habit of confiding in his supporters his feeling of sorrow that none of his clerical brethren had the manliness to follow his example and read the Lessons as they should be read: he had quite believed, he said, that in a short time the slovenly, monotonous reader would have ceased to appear at the lectern; he was greatly disappointed. But one Sunday an elderly Prebendary astonished every one by “putting on” two separate and distinct voices in reading the First Lesson. It was the chapter in which Moses pleads for the Children of Israel when their destruction is threatened by the Almighty. Now it will be plain to any one that to treat this duologue in an elocutionary style requires a delicacy of touch of the rarest sort; but unhappily the reader seemed to have the idea that all that was necessary to deal with the most important passages effectively was to deliver them in two voices, and this scheme he adopted. The one voice was that of a good-natured gentleman taking the part of naughty schoolboys who had been caught robbing the orchard of an irascible old farmer; the second voice was that of the irascible old farmer who had cornered them and had sent one of his staff for a dog whip.