On Sundays there was a service at two o'clock once a fortnight. On the alternating Sundays Herr Dremmel was driven by Johann to another village three miles distant which was part of his scattered parish, and here he preached the sermon he had preached to Kökensee the Sunday before. He practised a rigorous economy in sermons; and it had this advantage that an enthusiast--only there was no enthusiast--by waiting a week and walking three miles, most of which was deep sand, might hear again anything that had struck him the previous week. By waiting a year, indeed, the same enthusiast, supposing him there, could hear everything again, for Herr Dremmel's sermons numbered twenty-six and were planned to begin on January 1st with the Circumcision, and leaping along through the fortnights of the year ended handsomely and irregularly with an extra one at Christmas. However inattentive a member of the congregation might be, as the years passed over him he knew the sermons. They were sermons weighty, according to the season, either with practical advice or with wrathful expositions of duty. There was one every year when the threshing time was at hand on the text Micah iv. 13, _Arise and thresh_, explaining with patient exactitude the newest methods of doing it. There was the annual Harvest Thanks-giving sermon on Matthew xiii., part of verse 26, _Tares_, after yet another year of the congregation's obstinate indifference to chemical manure. There was the sermon on Jeremiah ix. 22, _Is there no physician there?_ preached yearly on one of the later Sundays in Trinity when the cold, continuous rains of autumn were finding out the weak spots in the parish's grandparents, and the peasants, having observed that once one called in a doctor the sick person got better and one had to pay the doctor into the bargain, evaded calling him in if they possibly could, inquiring of each other gloomily how one was to live if death were put a stop to. And there was the Advent sermon when the annual slaughter of pigs drew near, on Isaiah lxv., part of the 4th verse, _Swine's flesh_.