"Sound as a bell," answered a voice.

"I said so. We'll have en hoisted by Sunday, I'll send a waggon over
to Wheel Gooniver for a tackle and winch. Damme, up there!
Don't keep sheddin' such a muck o' dust on your betters!"

"I can't help no other, Squire!" said the voice overhead; "such a
cauch o' pilm an' twigs, an' birds' droppins'! If I sneeze I'm a
lost man."

Taffy, staring up as well as he could for the falling rubbish, could
just spy a white smock above the beam, and a glint of daylight on the
toe-scutes of two dangling boots.

"I'll dam soon make you help it. _Is_ the beam sound?"

"Ha'n't I told 'ee so?" said the voice querulously.

"Then come down off the ladder, you son of a--"

"Gently, Squire!" put in Mr. Raymond.

The Squire groaned. "There I go again--an' in the House of God
itself! Oh! 'tis a case with me! I've a heart o' stone--a heart o'
stone." He turned and brushed his rusty hat with his coat-cuff.
Suddenly he faced round again. "Here, Bill Udy," he said to the old
labourer who had just come down the ladder, "catch hold of my hat an'
carry en fore to porch. I keep forgettin' I'm in church, an' then on
he goes."

The building stood half a mile from the sea, surrounded by the
rolling towans and rabbit burrows, and a few lichen-spotted
tombstones slanting inland. Early in the seventeenth century a
London merchant had been shipwrecked on the coast below Nannizabuloe
and cast ashore, the one saved out of thirty. He asked to be shown a
church in which to give thanks for his preservation, and the people
led him to a ruin bedded in the sands. It had lain since the days of
Arundel's Rebellion. The Londoner vowed to build a new church there
on the towans, where the songs of prayer and praise should mingle
with the voice of the waves which God had baffled for him.
The people warned him of the sand; but he would not listen to reason.
He built his church--a squat Perpendicular building of two aisles,
the wider divided into nave and chancel merely by a granite step in
the flooring; he saw it consecrated, and returned to his home and
died. And the church steadily decayed. He had mixed his mortar with
sea-sand. The stonework oozed brine, the plaster fell piece-meal;
the blown sand penetrated like water; the foundations sank a foot on
the south side, and the whole structure took a list to leeward.
The living passed into the hands of the Dean and Chapter of Exeter,
and from them, in 17