Our three chaplains were all of them also minor canons of the cathedral. Very worthy, good men they were--one of them especially and exceptionally exemplary in his family relations; but their mode of performing the service in the chapel was not what would in these days be considered decorous or reverential. Besides the chaplaincy of the college, and the minor canonry of the cathedral, these gentlemen--all three of them, I believe--held small livings in the city. And the multiplicity of duty which had thus to be done rendered a decree of speed in the performance of the service so often a desideratum, and sometimes an absolute necessity, that that became the most marked characteristic of the performers. In reading, or rather intoning the prayers, the habit was to allow no time at all for the choir to chant their “Amen,” which had to be interjected in such sort that when the tones of it died away the priest had already got through two or three lines of the following prayer. One of our chaplains, who had the well-deserved character of being the fastest of the three, we called the diver. For it was his practice in reading or intoning to continue with great rapidity as long as his breath would last, and then, while recovering it, to proceed mentally without interruption, so that we lost sight (or hearing) of him at one point, and when he came to the surface, _i.e._, became audible again, he was several lines further down the page; and this we called “diving.” It was proudly believed in college that this was the gentleman of whom the story was first told, that he was ready to give any man to “Pontius Pilate” in the Creed, and arrive at the end before him. But however worthy competitor he may have been in such a race, I have reason to believe that the chaplain of a certain college in Oxford was the original of the story. Another of our three chaplains was a great sportsman. It was the practice that the lessons were always read in chapel by one of the prefects. I remember by the bye (but this is parenthetical), that one of our number was unable to pronounce the letter “r,” and we used to scheme that it should fall to his lot to tell us that “Ba_w_abbas was a _w_obber.” Now the boy who read the lessons, sat, not in his usual place, but by the side of the chaplain who was performing the service. And it was the habit of the reverend sportsman I have referred to, to intercalate with the verses of the Psalm he was reading, _sotto voce_, anecdotes of his most recent sporting achievements, addressed to the youth at his side, using for the purpose the interval during which the choir recited the alternate verse. As thus, on one twenty-eighth evening of the month, well remembered after some sixty years: “Who smote great kings: for his mercy endureth for ever.” Then aside, in the well-known great rolling, mellow voice (I can hear it now):