He had gone back to one of his more practiced tastes—­if one calls it a taste—­the cultivation of religion.  The farm stood bleak and lonely on the slope of a hillside, and on both flanks of the dale were other lonely farms as far as the eye could see.  There was no village.  The nearest place of worship was four miles away, and that was merely a church.  But in the valley beside the Wharfe was a small gray stone chapel, reared during some bygone day for the devotions of some forgotten sect.  Kettle got this into his control.

He was by no means a rich man.  The row of houses in Birkenhead were for the most part tenanted by the wives of mercantile marine engineers and officers, who were chronically laggard with their rent, and whom esprit de corps forbade him to press; and so, what with this deficit, and repairs and taxes, and one thing and another, it was rarely that half the projected L500 a year found its way into his banking account.  But a tithe of whatever accrued to him was scrupulously set aside for the maintenance of the chapel.

He imported there the grim, narrow creed he had learned in South Shields, and threw open the door for congregations.  He was entirely in earnest over it all, and vastly serious.  Failing another minister, he himself took the services, and though, on occasion, some other brother was induced to preach, it was he himself who usually mounted the pulpit beneath the sounding-board.  He purchased an American organ, and sent his eldest daughter weekly to take lessons in Skipton till she could play it.  And Mrs. Kettle herself led the singing.

Still further, the chapel has its own collection of hymns, specially written, printed and dedicated to its service.  The book is Captain Kettle’s first published effort.  Heaven and its author alone know under what wild circumstances most of those hymns were written.

The chapel started its new span of life with a congregation meagre enough, but Sunday by Sunday the number grew.  They are mostly Nonconformists in the dales, and when once a man acquires a taste for dissent, he takes a sad delight in sampling his neighbors’ variations of creed.  Some came once and were not seen again.  Others came and returned.  They felt that this was the loneliest of all modern creeds; indeed, Kettle preached as much, and one can take a melancholy pride in splendid isolation.

I am not sure that Captain Kettle does not find the restfulness of his present life a trifle too accentuated at times, though this is only inevitable for one who has been so much a man of action.  But at any rate he never makes complaint.  He is a strong man, and he governs himself even as he governs his family and the chapel circle, with a strong, just hand.  The farm is a model of neatness and order; paint is lavished in a way that makes dalesmen lift their eyebrows; and the routine of the household is as strict as that of a ship.