pleasantly! the Meeting was not excited, but it was
amused and enjoyed itself. It was an intellectual treat, as Pigeon said
to Brown, and if the younger people did not like it so well as they
would have liked a ball, the elder people liked it a great deal better,
and the hall rang with applause and with laughter as one speaker
succeeded another. It was pleasant to know how unstable "the Church" was
on her foundation; that aristocratical Church which looked down upon
Dissent, and of which the poorest adherent gave himself airs much above
Chapel folks; and how much loftier a position the Nonconformist held,
who would have nothing to say to State support.

"For my part," said one of the speakers, "I would rather abandon my
sacred calling to-morrow, or make tents as St. Paul did in its exercise,
than put on the gilded fetters of the State, and pray or preach as an
Archbishop told me; nay, as a Cabinet Council of godless worldlings
directed. There are many good men among the clergy of the Church of
England; but they are slaves, my friends, nothing but slaves, dragged at
the chariot wheels of the State; ruled by a caste of hard-headed
lawyers; or binding themselves in the rotten robes of tradition. It is
we only who can dare to say that we are free!"

At this sentiment, the Meeting fairly shouted with applause and delight
and self-complacency; and the speaker, delighted too, and tasting all
the sweetness of success, gave place to the next, and came and sat down
by Phoebe, to whose society the younger men were all very glad to escape.

"Miss Beecham, you are fashionably calm," whispered the orator, "you
don't throw yourself, like the rest of us, into this great agitation."

"Have you a leading member?" whispered Phoebe back again; "and does he
never drag you at his chariot wheels? Have you deacons that keep you up
to the mark? Have you people you must drink tea with when they ask you,
or else they throw up their sittings? I am thinking, of course, of
papa."

"Have I deacons? Have I leading members? Miss Beecham, you are cruel--"

"Hush!" said Phoebe, settling herself in her chair. "Here is somebody who
is in dreadful earnest. Don't talk, Mr. Northcote is going to speak."

Thus it will be seen that the Minister's daughter played her _role_ of
fine lady and _bel esprit_ very fairly in an atmosphere so unlike the
air that fine ladies breathe. Phoebe paid no more attention to the
discomfited man at her elbow. She gathered u