), abandoning his writing and looking at his parlour-maid
after speaking, like a man who fancied he had seen her face before but
couldn't recollect where.

"And they looks very firm, and Tranter Dewy do turn neither to the right
hand nor to the left, but stares quite straight and solemn with his mind
made up!"

"O, all the choir," repeated the vicar to himself, trying by that simple
device to trot out his thoughts on what the choir could come for.

"Yes; every man-jack of 'em, as I be alive!" (The parlour-maid was
rather local in manner, having in fact been raised in the same village.)
"Really, sir, 'tis thoughted by many in town and country that--"

"Town and country!--Heavens, I had no idea that I was public property in
this way!" said the vicar, his face acquiring a hue somewhere between
that of the rose and the peony. "Well, 'It is thought in town and
country that--'"

"It is thought that you be going to get it hot and strong!--excusen my
incivility, sir."

The vicar suddenly recalled to his recollection that he had long ago
settled it to be decidedly a mistake to encourage his servant Jane in
giving personal opinions. The servant Jane saw by the vicar's face that
he recalled this fact to his mind; and removing her forehead from the
edge of the door, and rubbing away the indent that edge had made,
vanished into the passage as Mr. Maybold remarked, "Show them in, Jane."

A few minutes later a shuffling and jostling (reduced to as refined a
form as was compatible with the nature of shuffles and jostles) was heard
in the passage; then an earnest and prolonged wiping of shoes, conveying
the notion that volumes of mud had to be removed; but the roads being so
clean that not a particle of dirt appeared on the choir's boots (those of
all the elder members being newly oiled, and Dick's brightly polished),
this wiping might have been set down simply as a desire to show that
respectable men had no wish to take a mean advantage of clean roads for
curtailing proper ceremonies. Next there came a powerful whisper from
the same quarter:-

"Now stand stock-still there, my sonnies, one and all! And don't make no
noise; and keep your backs close to the wall, that company may pass in
and out easy if they want to without squeezing through ye: and we two are
enough to go in." . . . The voice was the tranter's.

"I wish I could go in too and see the sight!" said a reedy voice--that of
Leaf.

"'Tis a pity Leaf is so terri