village he carried on the choir, and though there were only hymns, nothing could be better.  Of its kind I have seldom heard anything better.  They had to yield to the inexorable march of time, but I parted from them with regret.  Though we now have a surpliced choir of men and boys, with a trained organist and choirmaster, I always look back to my good old friend with his daughters and their companions, who were the leaders of the singing in the early days of my incumbency.

[Illustration:  THE PARISH CLERK OF QUEDGELEY]

The Rev. Canon Hemmans tell his reminiscences of Thomas Evison, parish clerk of Wragby, Lincolnshire, who died in 1865, aged eighty-two years.  He speaks of him as “a dear old friend, for whom I had a profound regard, and to whom I was grateful for much help during my noviciate at my first and only curacy.”

Thomas Evison was a shoemaker, and in his early years a great pot-house orator.  Settled on his well-known corner seat in the “Red Lion,” he would be seen each evening smoking his pipe and laying down the law in the character of the village oracle.  He must have had some determination and force of character, as one evening he laid down his pipe on the hob and said, “I’ll smoke no more.”  He also retired from his corner seat at the inn, but he was true to his political opinions, and remained an ardent Radical to the last.  This action showed some courage, as almost all the parish belonged to the squire, who was a strong Tory of the old school.  Canon Hemmans was curate of Wragby with the Rev. G.B.  Yard from 1851 to 1860, succeeding the present Dean of St. Paul’s.  Mr. Yard was a High Churchman, a personal friend of Manning, the Wilberforces, R. Sibthorpe, and Keble, and when expounding then unaccustomed and forgotten truths, he found the clerk a most intelligent and attentive hearer.  Evison used to attend the daily services, except the Wednesday and Friday Litany, which service was too short for him.  During the vicar’s absence Canon Hemmans, who was then a deacon, found the clerk a most reliable adviser and instructor in Lincolnshire customs and words and ways of thought.  When he was baptizing a child privately, the name Thirza was given to the child, which he did not recognise as a Bible name.  He consulted Evison, who said, “Oh, yes, it is so; it’s the name of Abel’s wife.”  On the next day Evison bought a book, Gesner’s Death of Abel, a translation of some Swedish or German work, in which the tragedy of the early chapters of Genesis is woven into a story with pious reflections.  This is not an uncommon book, and the clerk said these people believed it was as true as the Bible, because it claimed to be about Bible characters.

Evison was a diligent reader of newspapers, which were much fewer in his day, and studied diligently the sermons reported in the local Press.  He was much puzzled by the reference to “the leg end” of the story of the raising of Lazarus in a sermon preached by the Bishop of London, afterwards Archbishop Tait.  A reference to Bailey’s Dictionary and the finding of the word legend made matters clear.  Of course he miscalled words.  During the Russian War he told Mr. Hemmans that we were not fighting for “territororial possessions,” and he always read “Moabites and Hungarians” in his rendering of the sixth verse of the 83rd Psalm.