s young hearers: "Behold the King in all his pomp
and glory, soodenly toombled from his high elevation, and mingled wi'
the doost!"

In 1845 a new church was built on the old site, a new curate came, Kitty
Hill died, and was succeeded in his office by his widow, who did all
that she could do of the clerk's work, and showed remarkable taste in
decorating the church at Christmas. No clerk was needed for the
responses, as the congregation joined heartily in the service, and there
was a much better attendance than there is now. She died in the
early fifties.

Amongst other varied readings of the Psalms that of an old parish clerk
at Hartlepool may be given. He had been a sailor, and used to render
Psalm civ. 26 as "There go the ships, and there is that lieutenant whom
Thou hast made to take his pastime therein."

The late Dr. Gatty, in his record of _A Life at One Living_, mentions
that at Ecclesfield, as in many other places, the office of parish clerk
was hereditary. The last holder of the office, who used to sit in his
desk clad in a black bombazine gown, was a publican by trade, a decent,
honest man, who during the fifty-one years he was clerk was only twice
absent from service. He died in 1868, and the offices of clerk and
sexton were then united and held by one person.

The register books of Weybridge, Surrey, were kept for a great part of
the eighteenth century by the parish clerks, the son succeeding his
father in office for three or four generations.

Now probably the clerks are no more clerks but vergers; and as a
Yorkshireman remarked, "_Verging_ is a very honourable profession."

The portrait of John Gray, sometime clerk in Eton College Chapel, taken
in his gown as he stood in his desk, has been engraved, and is well
known to old Etonians.

* * * * *

Few people possess the gift of humour in the same degree as the late
Bishop Walsham How, and his stories of the race of parish clerks and
vergers must not be omitted, and are here published by permission of his
son, Mr. F.D. How, editor of _Lighter Moments_.

When I was a deacon, and naturally shy, I was visiting my aunts at
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 th