of loaves of bread, which there would seem
to be nobody left in the exhausted congregation
to claim, and which I saw an exhausted beadle,
long faded out of uniform, eating with his eyes
for self and family when I passed in. There is
also an exhausted clerk in a brown wig, and two
or three exhausted doors and windows have
been bricked up, and the service books are
musty, and the pulpit cushions are threadbare,
and the whole of the church furniture is in a
very advanced stage of exhaustion. We are
three old women (habitual), two young lovers
(accidental), two tradesmen, one with a wife and
one alone, an aunt and nephew, again two girls
(these two girls dressed out for church with
everything about them limp that should be stiff,
and vice versâ, are an invariable experience), and
three sniggering boys. The clergyman is,
perhaps, the chaplain of a civic company; he has
the moist and vinous look, and eke the bulbous
boots, of one acquainted with 'Twenty port, and
comet vintages.

We are so quiet in our dulness that the three
sniggering boys, who have got away into a
corner by the altar-railing, give us a start, like
crackers, whenever they laugh. And this
reminds me of my own village church where,
during sermon-time on bright Sundays when the
birds are very musical indeed, farmers' boys
patter out over the stone pavement, and the
clerk steps out from his desk after them, and is
distinctly heard in the summer repose to pursue
and punch them in the churchyard, and is seen to
return with a meditative countenance, making
believe that nothing of the sort has happened.
The aunt and nephew in this City church are
much disturbed by the sniggering boys. The
nephew is himself a boy, and the sniggerers
tempt him to secular thoughts of marbles and
string, by secretly offering such commodities
to his distant contemplation. This young Saint
Anthony for a while resists, but presently
becomes a backslider, and in dumb show defies
the sniggerers to "heave" a marble or two
in his direction. Herein he is detected by
the aunt (a rigorous reduced gentlewoman who
has the charge of offices), and I perceive
that worthy relative to poke him in the side,
with the corrugated hooked handle of an
ancient umbrella. The nephew revenges himself
for this, by holding his breath and terrifying his
kinswoman with the dread belief that he has
made up his mind to burst. Regardless of
whispers and shakes, he swells and becomes
discoloured, and yet again swells and becomes
discoloured, until the aunt can bear it no longer,
but leads him out, with no visible neck, and
with his eyes going before him like a prawn's.
This causes the sniggerers to regard flight as an
eligible move, and I know which of them will
go out first, because of the over-devout attention
that he suddenly concentrates on the clergyman.
In a little while, this hypocrite, with an elaborate
demonstration of hushing his footsteps,
and with a face generally expressive of having
until now forgotten a religious appointment
elsewhere, is gone. Number two gets out in the
same way, but rather quicker. Number three
getting safely to the door, there turns reckless,
and banging it open, flies forth with a Whoop!
that vibrates to the top of the tower above us.

The clergyman, who is of a prandial presence
and a muffled voice, may be scant of hearing as
well as of breath, but he only glances up, as
having an idea that somebody has said Amen in
a wrong place, and continues his steady jog-trot,
like a farmer's wife going to market. He does
all he has to do, in the same easy way, and gives
us a concise sermon, still like the jog-trot of the
farmer's wife on a level road. Its drowsy
cadence soon lulls the three old women asleep,
and the unmarried tradesman sits looking out
at window, and the married tradesman sits looking
at his wife's bonnet, and the lovers sit looking
at one another, so superlatively happy, that
I mind when I, turned of eighteen, went with
my Angelica to a City church on account of a
shower (by this special coincidence that it was
in Huggin-lane), and when I said to my Angelica,
"Let the blessed event, Angelica, occur at no
altar but this!" and when my Angelica consented
that it should occur at no other—which
it certainly never did, for it never occurred
anywhere. And O, Angelica, what has become of
you, this present Sunday morning when I can't
attend to the sermon; and, more difficult
question than that, what has become of Me as I
was when I sat by your side!

But we receive the signal to make that unanimous
dive which surely is a little conventional
—like the strange rustlings and settlings and
clearings of throats and noses, which are never
dispensed with, at certain points of the Church
service, and are never held to be necessary
under any other circumstances. In a minute
more it is all over, and the organ expresses
itself to be as glad of it as it can be of anything
in its rheumatic state, and in another minute
we are all of us out of the church, and Whity-
brown has locked it up. Another minute or
little more, and, in the neighbouring churchyard
—not the yard of that church, but of another—
a churchyard like a great shabby old mignionette-
box, with two trees in it and one tomb—I meet
Whity-brown, in his private capacity, fetching
a pint of beer for his dinner from the public-
house in the corner, where the keys of the rotting
fire-ladders are kept and were never asked
for, and where there is a ragged, white-seamed,
out-at-elbowed bagatelle-board on the first floor.

In one of these City churches, and only in
one, I found an individual who might have been
claimed as expressly a City personage. I
remember the church, by the feature that the
clergyman couldn't get to his own desk without
going through the clerk's, or couldn't get to the
pulpit without going through the reading-desk
—I forget which, and it's no matter—and by
the presence of this personage among the
exceedingly sparse congregation. I doubt if we
were a dozen, and we had no exhausted charity
school to help us out. The personage was
dressed in black of square cut, and was stricken
in years, and wore a black velvet cap, and cloth