In giving out the hymns or Psalms many difficulties of pronunciation would often arise. One clerk had many struggles over the line, "Awed by Thy gracious word." He could not manage that tiresome first word, and always called it "a wed." The old metrical version of the Psalm, "Like as the hart desireth the water-brooks," etc. is still with us, and a beautiful hymn it is: "As pants the hart for cooling streams When heated in the chase." A Northumbrian clerk used to give out the words thus: "As pants the 'art for coolin' streams When 'eated in the chaise," which seems to foreshadow the triumph of modern civilisation, the carted deer, a mode of stag-hunting that was scarcely contemplated by Tate and Brady. CHAPTER XIV SLEEPY CHURCH AND SLEEPY CLERKS There was a time when the Church of England seemed to be asleep. Perhaps it may have been that "tired nature's sweet restorer, balmy sleep," was only preparing her exhausted energies for the unwonted activities of the last half-century; or was it the sleep that presaged death? Her enemies told her so in plain and unvarnished language. Her friends, too, said that she was folding her robes to die with what dignity she could. Lethargy, sloth, sleep--a dead, dull, dreary sleep--fell like a leaden pall upon her spiritual life, darkening the light that shone but vaguely through the storied panes of her mediæval windows, while a paralysing numbness crippled her limbs and quenched her activity. Such scenes as Archbishop Benson describes as his early recollection of Upton, near Droitwich, were not uncommon. The church was aisleless, and the middle passage, with high pews on each side, led up to the chancel-arch, in which was a "three-decker," fifteen feet high. The clerk wore a wig and immense horn spectacles. He was a shoemaker, dressed in black, with a white tie. In the gallery sat "the music"--a clarionet, flute, violin, and 'cello. The clerk gave out the "Twentieth Psalm of David," and the fiddlers tuned for a moment and then played at once. Then they struck up, and the clerk, absolutely alone, in a majestic voice which swayed up and down without regard to time or tune, sang it through like the braying of an ass; not a soul else joined in; the farmers amused and smiling at each other. Such scenes were quite usual. In Cornwall affairs were worse. In one church the curate-in-charge had to be chained to the altar rails while he read the service, as he had a harmless mania, which made him suddenly flee from the church if his own activities were for an instant suspended, as, for example, by a response. The churchwarden, a farmer, kept the padlock-key in his pocket till the service was safely over, and then released the imprisoned cleric. At another Cornish church the vicar's sister used to read the lessons in a deep bass voice.