smart, to our prayers. Last
time I walked up this path, it was hidden with red cloth, and flowers
were tumbling under my feet. Ah! red cloth comes but once in a lifetime.
It is only the queen who lives in an atmosphere of red cloth and cut
flowers.

We are in church now. The service is in progress. Can it be only _five_
Sundays ago that I was standing here as I am now, watching all the
little well-known incidents? Father standing up in frock-coat and
spectacles, keeping a sharp lookout over the top of his prayer-book, to
see _how_ late the servants are. The ill-behaved charity-boys emulously
trying who shall make the hind-legs of his chair squeak the loudest on
the stone floor. Toothless Jack leering distantly at Barbara from the
side aisle. Something apparently is amusing him. He is smiling a little.
I see his teeth. They, at least, are new. _They_ were not here five
weeks ago. The little starved curate--the one who tore his gloves into
strips--loses his place in the second lesson, and madly plunges at three
different wrong verses in succession, before he regains the thread of
his narrative.

We have come to the sermon. The text is, "I have married a wife, and
therefore I cannot come." No sooner is it given out than Algy, Bobby,
and Tou Tou, all look at me and grin; but father, who has a wily way of
establishing himself in the corner of the pew, so as to have a
bird's-eye view of all our demeanors, speedily frowns them down into a
preternatural gravity. Ah, why _to-day_, of all days, did they laugh?
and why _to-day_, of all days, did the servants file noisily in,
numerous and out of breath, in the middle of the psalms? I tremble when
I think of the bag.

Well, who will may laugh again now: we are out in the sunshine, with the
church-yard grass bowing and swaying in the wind, and the little
cloud-shadows flying across the half-effaced names of the forgotten
dead, who lie under their lichen-grown tombs.

"Did you see his _teeth_?" asks Tou Tou, joining me with a leap, almost
before I am outside the church-porch.

"They are not comfortable yet," remarks Bobby, gravely, as he walks
beside me carrying my prayer-book. "I could see that: he was taking them
out, and putting them in again, with his tongue all through the Litany."

"When once he has secured Barbara, I expect that they will go back with
the box for good and all--eh, Barbara?" say I, laughing, as I speak; but
Barbara is out of ear-shot. She is lingering be