“Leah’s handmaid,” suggested the clerk.  “Zilpah, I baptize thee,” said the priest, and all was well.

In that church the few farmers who met to levy a poor-rate and do other parochial work insisted on doing so within the chancel rails, using the holy table as the writing-desk, and the assigned reason for so doing was that, being apt to quarrel and dispute over parish matters, there would be no danger at such a place as this of using profane language.  All in the diocese of Oxford.

It was in the twenties that I must have seen old P.W. (the parish clerk) and two other men in the desk singing to “Hanover,” with a certain apparent self-complacency in nice smock-frocks, “My soul, praise the Lord, speak good of His Name,” etc.  The little congregation listened with seeming contentment, and it is worth recording that the parson always preached in the surplice.  I suppose Pusey was a boy at that time, but the custom in this church was not a novelty, whether right or wrong.

It was not the clerk’s fault that the hour of service was hastened by some seventy minutes one afternoon, so that one or two invariably late worshippers were astounded to be driven backwards from the church by the congregation returning from service.  But so it was.  The really well-meaning kind-hearted parson was withal a keen sportsman and a worthy gentleman, and with his “long dogs” and man was on his horse and away for Illsley Downs race course to come off next day, and his dogs (they won) must not be fatigued.  Old P.W., the clerk, reached a good age, an inoffensive man.

I was rather interested when residing in my parish in grand old Yorkshire to observe two steady-looking and rather elderly men, each aided by a strong walking-stick, coming to church with praiseworthy regularity and reverence.  I found, on making their acquaintance, that they were brothers who had recently come into the parish, natives of “the Peak,” or of the locality near the Peak, which was not many miles distant from my parish.

Since I heard from their lips the story which I am about to relate, I have heard it told, mutatis mutandis, as happening in sundry other parishes, until one rather doubts the genuineness of the record at all.  But as they recounted it it ran as follows, and I am sure they believed what they told me.

Some malicious person or persons unknown entered the church, and having seized the rather large typed Prayer Book used by the clerk, who was somewhat advanced in years, they observed that the words “the righteous shall flourish like” were the last words at the bottom of the page, whereupon they altered the next words on the top of the following page, and which were “the palm tree,” into “a green bay horse”; and, the change being carefully made, the result on the Sunday following was that the well-meaning clerk, studiously uttering each word of his Prayer Book, found himself declaring very erroneous doctrine.  “Hulloa,” cried he; “I must hearken back.  This’ll never do.”  Now I cannot call to mind the name of the parish.  It was not Chapel-in-the-Frith.  Was it Mottram-in-Longdendale?  I really cannot remember.  But these two old men asserted that thenceforward it became a saying, “I must hearken back, like the clerk of—.”