I have also seen him at afternoon service (there was no evening service in those days), when it unexpectedly came on too dark for the clergyman to see his MS. in the pulpit, go to the altar--an ordinary table with drawers--throw up the cloth, open a drawer, take out two candles and a box of matches, go up the pulpit stairs, fix them in the candlesticks, and light them. During the winter months part of his duty was to tend the fire during service in the Duke of Bedford's large curtained, carpeted pew in the chancel. When I was a boy I was staying in Northamptonshire, and went one Sunday morning into a village church for service (I think it was Fotheringhay). There was a three-decker, and the clerk from his desk led the singing of the congregation, which he faced. There was no musical instrument of any kind. The hymn, which of course was from Tate and Brady, was the metrical version of Psalm xlii. The clerk gave out the Psalm, then read the first line to the congregation, then sang it solo, and then the congregation sang it altogether; and so on line after line for the whole eleven verses. More attention must have been paid in those days to the requirement of the ninety-first Canon, that the clerk should be known, if may be, "for his competent skill in singing." In 1873 I was curate-in-charge of an out-of-the-way Norfolk village. On my first Sunday I had an early celebration at 8 a.m. I arrived in church about 7.45, and to my amazement saw five old men sitting round the stove in the nave with their hats on, smoking their pipes. I expostulated with them quite gently, but they left the church before service and never came again. I discovered afterwards that they had been regular communicants, and that my predecessor always distributed the offertory to the poor present immediately after the service. When these men in the course of my remonstrance found that I was not going to continue the custom, they no longer cared to be communicants. In 1870, in Norfolk, I went round with the rural dean visiting the churches. At one church the only person to receive the rural dean was the parish clerk, who was ready with the funeral pall to put over the rural dean's horse whilst waiting outside the church. It was this same church which, in preparation for the rural dean's visit, had been recently and completely whitewashed throughout. Not only the walls and pillars, but also the pews, the school forms, the pulpit, and also the altar itself, a very small four-legged deal table without any covering. I suppose this was done by the churchwardens to conceal the dilapidated condition of everything; but they had omitted to remove the grass which was growing in the crevices of the floor paving. Mr. Moxon (deceased), formerly rector of Hethersett, in Norfolk, told me that he had once preached for a friend in a Norfolk village church with the woman clerk holding an umbrella over his head in the pulpit throughout the sermon, because of the "dreep."