t to chapel; then Mrs. Furze went
on fine days, and, after a little interval, Mr. Furze went on a fine day.
A fund had been set going to "restore" the church: the heavy roof was to
be removed, and a much lighter and handsomer roof covered with slate was
to be substituted; the stonework of many of the windows, which the rector
declared had begun to show "signs of incipient decay," was to be cut out
and replaced with new, so as to make, to use the builder's words, "a good
job of it," and a memorial window was to be put in near the great west
window with its stained glass, the Honourable Mr. Eaton having determined
upon this mode of commemorating the services of his nephew, Lieutenant
Eaton, who had died of dysentery in India, brought on by inattention to
tropical rules of eating and drinking, particularly the latter. Oliver
Cromwell, it was said, had stabled his horses in the church. This,
however, is doubtful, for the quantity of stable accommodation he must
have required throughout the country, to judge from vergers and
guidebooks, must have been much larger than his armies would have needed,
if they had been entirely composed of cavalry; and the evidence is not
strong that his horses were so ubiquitous. It was further affirmed that,
during the Cromwellian occupation, the west window was mutilated; but
there was also a tradition that, in the days of George the Third, there
were complaints of dinginess and want of light, and that part of the
stained glass was removed and sold. Anyhow, there was stained glass in
the Honourable Mr. Eaton's mansion wonderfully like that at Eastthorpe.
It was now proposed to put new stained glass in the defective lights.
Some of the more advanced of the parishioners, including the parson and
the builder, thought the old glass had better all come out, "the only way
to make a good job of it"; but at an archidiaconal visitation the
archdeacon protested, and he was allowed to have his own way. Then there
was the warming, and this was a great difficulty, because no natural exit
for the pipe could be found. At last it was settled to have three
stoves, one at the west end of the nave, and one in each transept. With
regard to the one in the nave there was no help for it but to bore a hole
through the wall. The builder undertook "to give the pipe outside a
touch of the Gothic, so that it wouldn't look bad," and as for the other
stoves, there were two windows just handy. By cutting out the head