and extinction of the candles was done with as much
suppressed excitement as if the candles were going to shoot red and
green stars or go leaping and cracking all round the chancel.

It happened this evening that the preacher was Father Rowley, that
famous priest of the Silchester College Mission in the great naval port
of Chatsea. Father Rowley was a very corpulent man with a voice of such
compassion and with an eloquence so simple that when he ascended into
the pulpit, closed his eyes, and began to speak, his listeners
involuntarily closed their eyes and followed that voice whithersoever it
led them. He neither changed the expression of his face nor made use of
dramatic gestures; he scarcely varied his tone, yet he could keep a
congregation breathlessly attentive for an hour. Although he seemed to
be speaking in a kind of trance, it was evident that he was unusually
conscious of his hearers, for if by chance some pious woman coughed or
turned the pages of a prayer-book he would hold up the thread of his
sermon and without any change of tone reprove her. It was strange to
watch him at such a moment, his eyes still tightly shut and yet giving
the impression of looking directly at the offending member of the
congregation. This evening he was preaching about a naval disaster which
had lately occurred, the sinking of a great battleship by another great
battleship through a wrong signal. He was describing the scene when the
news reached Chatsea, telling of the sweethearts and wives of the lost
bluejackets who waited hoping against hope to hear that their loved ones
had escaped death and hearing nearly always the worst news.

"So many of our own dear bluejackets and marines, some of whom only
last Christmas had been eating their plum duff at our Christmas dinner,
so many of my own dear boys whom I prepared for Confirmation, whose
first Confession I had heard, and to whom I had given for the first time
the Body and Blood of Our Lord Jesus Christ."

He spoke too of what it meant in the future of material suffering on top
of their mental agony. He asked for money to help these women
immediately, and he spoke fiercely of the Admiralty red tape and of the
obstruction of the official commission appointed to administer the
relief fund.

The preacher went on to tell stories from the lives of these boys,
finding in each of them some illustration of a Christian virtue and
conveying to his listeners a sense of the extraordinary pre