"Amen, amen!" said Scholes fervently. "Amen!" "Cursed," continued the vicar, glancing round at his respondent parishioner, and nervously hurrying forward, "are...." "Covetous persons, extortioners!" exclaimed Scholes, anticipating certain passages to come. "Amen, amen! So they are--amen!" Then without waiting to hear what it was that the prophet David bore witness for, he clapped his prayer-book together with a loud noise, and hurried from the church; through one of the windows the vicar saw him walking among the tombs outside, gesticulating, and evidently talking to himself. When the service was over, he went out to him. "I fear the service distressed you, Scholes," he began, diffidently. "You are----" Scholes waved his arms abroad. "Nowt o' t'sort!" he exclaimed. "I wor delighted wi' it! I could like to hev that theer service read ivery Sunda'! I wor allus wantin' to mak' sure 'at a certain person 'at I could name wor cursed. An', of course, wheer theer's cursin' theer's vengeance--vengeance, vengeance!" "Don't forget, Scholes, that it has been wisely said, 'Vengeance is Mine: I will repay, saith the Lord,'" answered the vicar, in his mildest tones. "You must remember----" "Now, then, I forget nowt!" retorted Scholes. "I know all about it. But t'Lord mun use instruments--human instruments! Aw, it's varry comfortin', is what ye and me read together this mornin'--varry comfortin' to me. Cursed! 'Covetous persons'! Aw!--ye needn't go far away to find _one_!" The vicar was one of those men who dislike scenes and enthusiasm, and he left Scholes to himself, meditating among the gravestones, and went home to tell his wife that he wished somebody would give the man a quiet hint that loud upliftings of voice were not desirable in public worship. But next Sunday Scholes was not in his accustomed place--the front pew in the south aisle--nor did he come to church again. The clauses in the Commination Service had set his crazy brain off on another tack, and from the day on which he heard them he forgot the temporary anæsthetic which religious observance had brought to him, and sought out his older and more familiar one--drink. He took to frequenting the "Brown Cow," a hostelry of less pretensions than the "Coach-and-Four," and there he would sit for hours, quietly drinking rum and water--as inoffensive, said the landlady, as a pet lamb in a farm-house kitchen.