his master. In due time the latter went to the vestry, put on his black gown, and ascended the pulpit, when, soon after beginning his sermon, he became aware that the people were all convulsed with laughter, and looking down over the pulpit cushion he saw his dog with its hind legs on the seat and its forefeet on the cushion of the reading-desk gravely regarding the congregation.

My grandfather was once baptizing a small collier boy of three or four years old at Workington. Other children having been first baptized, he proceeded to baptize this boy also, but when he put the water on his forehead the boy turned upon him fiercely, saying, "What did you do that for, ye great black dog? I did nothing to you!"

When I was a deacon, and naturally shy, I was visiting my aunts in Workington, where my grandfather had been Rector, and was asked to preach on Sunday evening in St. John's, a wretched modern church—a plain oblong with galleries, and a pulpit like a very tall wineglass, with a very narrow little straight staircase leading up to it, in the middle of the east part of the church. When the hymn before the sermon was given out I went as usual to the vestry to put on the black gown. Not knowing that the clergyman generally stayed there till the end of the hymn, I emerged as soon as I had thus vested myself and walked to the pulpit and ascended the stairs. When nearly at the summit, to my horror I discovered a very fat beadle in the pulpit lighting the candles. We could not possibly pass on the stairs, and the eyes of the whole congregation were upon me. It would be ignominious to retreat. So after a few minutes' reflection I saw my way out of the difficulty, which I overcame by a very simple mechanical contrivance. I entered the pulpit, which exactly fitted the beadle and myself, and then face to face we executed a rotatory movement to the extent of a semi-circle, when the beadle finding himself next the door of the pulpit was enabled to descend, and I remained master of the situation.

When curate at Kidderminster, I had on one occasion to baptize nine children at once. The ninth was a boy of nearly two years of age, and was taken up and put into my arms. This he stoutly resisted, beginning immediately to kick with all his might. His clothes being very loose and very short, he very soon kicked himself all but out of them, but I had got him fast by his clothes and his head, and was repeating the words of reception into the Church with as much gravity as I could command, when his mother, possessing a strong maternal appreciation of the fair proportions of her lively offspring and a relatively weak appreciation of the solemnity of the occasion, remarked aloud to me, with a gratified smile, "He's a nice little lump, sir, isn't he?"

The Earl of Powis, among his many acts of generous kindness, has given substantial aid to the Rev. C. F. Lowder's very poor district of St. Peter's, London Docks. He went to the laying of the stone of the church there, and just as the ceremony was about to begin a bottle was handed by some one to Mr. Lowder. He could not make it out, and consulted Lord Powis, who at last ingeniously suggested that, as it looked like oil, it was probably intended for the anointing of the stone. So they agreed to pour it quietly on the stone then and there. The smell that arose was dreadful, but the service began, and very few had noticed the bottle. In the evening an old woman, a former parishioner, came up to Mr. Lowder, and asked after his rheumatism, and said she hoped he got the bottle. On his saying, "Oh, yes, it reached me quite safely," she explained that it was a wonderful cure for rheumatism, which she had manufactured herself.