a few favourite chapters; and I am bound to say that, so far as my experience goes, the character so frequently drawn in romances of intense Bible students in Dissenting congregations is very rare.  At the same time Mr. Catfield believed himself to be very orthodox, and in his way was very pious.  I could never call him a hypocrite.  He was as sincere as he could be, and yet no religious expression of his was ever so sincere as the most ordinary expression of the most trifling pleasure or pain.

The second deacon, Mr. Weeley, was, as he described himself, a builder and undertaker; more properly an undertaker and carpenter.  He was a thin, tall man, with a tenor voice, and he set the tunes.  He was entirely without energy of any kind, and always seemed oppressed by a world which was too much for him.  He had depended a good deal for custom upon his chapel connection; and when the attendance at the chapel fell off, his trade fell off likewise, so that he had to compound with his creditors.  He was a mere shadow, a man of whom nothing could be said either good or evil.

The third deacon was Mr. Snale, the draper.  When I first knew him he was about thirty-five.  He was slim, small, and small-faced, closely shaven, excepting a pair of little curly whiskers, and he was extremely neat.  He had a little voice too, rather squeaky, and the marked peculiarity that he hardly ever said anything, no matter how disagreeable it might be, without stretching as if in a smile his thin little lips.  He kept the principal draper’s shop in the town, and even Church people spent their money with him, because he was so very genteel compared with the other draper, who was a great red man, and hung things outside his window.  Mr. Snale was married, had children, and was strictly proper.  But his way of talking to women and about them was more odious than the way of a debauchee.  He invariably called them “the ladies,” or more exactly, “the leedies”; and he hardly ever spoke to a “leedy” without a smirk and some faint attempt at a joke.

One of the customs of the chapel was what were called Dorcas meetings.  Once a month the wives and daughters drank tea with each other; the evening being ostensibly devoted to making clothes for the poor.  The husband of the lady who gave the entertainment for the month had to wait upon the company, and the minister was expected to read to them while they worked.

It was my lot to be Mr. Snale’s guest two or three times when Mrs. Snale was the Dorcas hostess.  We met in the drawing-room, which was over the shop, and looked out into the town market-place.  There was a round table in the middle of the room, at which Mrs. Snale sat and made the tea.  Abundance of hot buttered toast and muffins were provided, which Mr. Snale and a maid handed round to the party.

Four pictures decorated the walls.  One hung over the mantelpiece.  It was a portrait in oils of Mr. Snale, and opposite to it, on the other side, was a portrait of Mrs. Snale.  Both were daubs, but curiously faithful in depicting what was most offensive in the character of both the originals, Mr. Snale’s simper being preserved; together with the peculiarly hard, heavy sensuality of the eye in Mrs. Snale, who was large and full-faced, correct like Mr. Snale, a member of the church, a woman whom I never saw moved to any generosity, and cruel not with the ferocity of the tiger, but with the dull insensibility of a cartwheel, which will roll over a man’s neck as easily as over a flint.  The third picture represented the descent of the Holy Ghost; a number of persons sitting in a chamber, and each one with the flame of a candle on his head.  The fourth represented the last day.  The Son of God was in a chair surrounded by clouds, and beside Him was a flying figure blowing a long mail-coach horn.  The dead were coming up out of their graves; some were half out of the earth, others three-parts out—the whole of the bottom part of the picture being filled with bodies emerging from the ground, a few looking happy, but most of them very wretched; all of them being naked.

The first time I went to Mrs. Snale’s Dorcas gathering Mr. Snale was reader, on the ground that I was a novice; and I was very glad to resign the task to him.  As the business in hand was week-day and secular, it was not considered necessary that the selected subjects should be religious; but as it was distinctly connected with the chapel, it was also considered that they should have a religious flavour.  Consequently the Bible was excluded, and so were books on topics altogether worldly.  Dorcas meetings were generally, therefore, shut up to the denominational journal and to magazines.  Towards the end of the evening Mr. Snale read the births, deaths, and marriages in this journal.  It would not have been thought right to read them from any other newspaper, but it was agreed, with a fineness of tact which was very remarkable, that it was quite right to read them in one which was “serious.”  During the whole time that the reading was going on conversation was not arrested, but was conducted in a kind of half whisper; and this was another reason why I exceedingly disliked to read, for I could never endure to speak if people did not listen.

At half-past eight the work was put away, and Mrs. Snale went to the piano and played a hymn tune, the minister having first of all selected the hymn.  Singing over, he offered a short prayer, and the company separated.  Supper was not served, as it was found to be too great an expense.  The husbands of the ladies generally came to escort them home, but did not come upstairs.  Some of the gentlemen waited below in the dining-room, but most of them preferred the shop, for, although it was shut, the gas was burning to enable the assistants to put away the goods which had been got out during the day.

When it first became my turn to read I proposed the Vicar of Wakefield; but although no objection was raised at the time, Mr. Snale took an opportunity of telling me, after I had got through a chapter or two, that he thought it would be better if it were discontinued.  “Because, you know, Mr. Rutherford,” he said, with his smirk, “the company is mixed; there are young leedies present, and perhaps, Mr. Rutherford, a book with a more requisite tone might be more suitable on such an occasion.”  What he meant I did not know, and how to find a book with a more requisite tone I did not know.

However, the next time, in my folly, I tried a selection from George Fox’s Journal.  Mr. Snale objected to this too.  It was “hardly of a character adapted for social intercourse,” he thought; and furthermore, “although Mr. Fox might be a very good man, and was a converted character, yet he did not, you know, Mr. Rutherford, belong to us.”  So I was reduced to that class of literature which of all others I most abominated, and which always seemed to me the most profane—religious and sectarian gossip, religious novels designed to make religion attractive, and other slip-slop of this kind.  I could not endure it, and was frequently unwell on Dorcas evenings.

The rest of the small congregation was of no particular note.  As I have said before, it had greatly fallen away, and all who remained clung to the chapel rather by force of habit than from any other reason.  The only exception was an old maiden lady and her sister, who lived in a little cottage about a mile out of the town.  They were pious in the purest sense of the word, suffering much from ill-health, but perfectly resigned, and with a kind of tempered cheerfulness always apparent on their faces, like the cheerfulness of a white sky with a sun veiled by light and lofty clouds.  They were the daughters of a carriage-builder, who had left them a small annuity.

Their house was one of the sweetest which I ever entered.  The moment I found myself inside it, I became conscious of perfect repose.  Everything was at rest; books, pictures, furniture, all breathed the same peace.  Nothing