ew on
the right side was occupied, when we last saw it, with three
brushes, an elderly shovel, and two gas-meters, one of them being a
very full-grown fatherly affair--a sort of deacon amongst ordinary
meters, and looking very authoritatively upon its smaller colleague
and the brushes. The pulpit, at the eastern end of the chapel, is
neatly made, but when the parson sits in it you can't see him from
the front. When we went the other Sunday evening, we could see no
one in it; but after a hymn had been sung, a spring seemed to be
touched, and up jumped the parson, who had been reclining on his
dorsal vertebra for eight minutes at the rear. The pulpit formerly
stood about a foot-and-a-half higher than it does now; Mr. Slate,
who was a little man, would have it a good height; but a hole was
afterwards made in the platform supporting the pulpit, and it was
dropped through it to the level of the ordinary floor, where it now
stands. Six chairs, in Gothic design, with cushions of rich velvet,
are placed upon the platform near the pulpit; in the centre there is
a more patriarchal-looking seat--a sort of pastoral throne; and in
the front of the whole there is a strong table. The deacons and the
minister sit here periodically, feeling grand and furzy all over,
weighing up the universe on special occasions, but endeavouring
always to discharge their executive duties with due propriety and
gravity. We have seen them once or twice on this platform--on those
silk velvet-bottomed chairs, resting upon Brussels carpet--and they
looked majestic. One old gentleman we know, who used to be a deacon
here, never would sit in any of these chairs. He seemed to have
either a dread of the eighteen-inch elevation they conferred, or a
fear that the platform would give way, or a dislike of the
conspicuousness caused by it, and on all occasions when his official
brethren took possession of the chairs, he sat upon an open bench
adjoining.

An ancient-looking organ, of Gothic pattern, and formerly used in a
Blackburn chapel, is placed within an archway in the eastern
gallery. It is a moderately fair instrument, and is decently played,
but it is not good enough for the place, and it is quite time to
sell it to some other chapel, and get a better. The choir contains
about the usual complement of smiling young men and maidens, with a
central gentleman "bearded like the pard," who sits in state in an
elaborately backed chair, and conducts the proceedings