The same clergyman, when he went up to the altar for the Communion Service, knelt down, as his habit was, at the north end for private prayer whilst the congregation were singing a metrical Psalm (Old or New Version).  On looking up he saw that Kitty Hill had followed him within the rails and was kneeling at the opposite end of the Holy Table staring at him with round eyes full of amazement at this unusual act of devotion.  Both the curate and the clerk spoke the broadest Yorkshire.  Psalm xxxii. 4 was thus rendered by Kitty:  “Ma-maasture is like t’ doong i’ summer.”  He was an old man and quite bald, and used to sit in his desk with a blue-spotted pocket-handkerchief spread over his head, occasionally drawing down a corner of it for use, and then pulling it straight again.  If the squire happened to come late to church—­a thing which did not often happen—­the curate would pause in his reading and apologise:  “Good morning, Mr. ——.  I am sorry, sir, that I began the service.  I thought you were not coming this morning.”  One sentence of the sermon preached on the death of King William IV long remained in the memory of some of his young hearers:  “Behold the King in all his pomp and glory, soodenly toombled from his high elevation, and mingled wi’ the doost!”

In 1845 a new church was built on the old site, a new curate came, Kitty Hill died, and was succeeded in his office by his widow, who did all that she could do of the clerk’s work, and showed remarkable taste in decorating the church at Christmas.  No clerk was needed for the responses, as the congregation joined heartily in the service, and there was a much better attendance than there is now.  She died in the early fifties.

Amongst other varied readings of the Psalms that of an old parish clerk at Hartlepool may be given.  He had been a sailor, and used to render Psalm civ. 26 as “There go the ships, and there is that lieutenant whom Thou hast made to take his pastime therein.”

The late Dr. Gatty, in his record of A Life at One Living, mentions that at Ecclesfield, as in many other places, the office of parish clerk was hereditary.  The last holder of the office, who used to sit in his desk clad in a black bombazine gown, was a publican by trade, a decent, honest man, who during the fifty-one years he was clerk was only twice absent from service.  He died in 1868, and the offices of clerk and sexton were then united and held by one person.

The register books of Weybridge, Surrey, were kept for a great part of the eighteenth century by the parish clerks, the son succeeding his father in office for three or four generations.

Now probably the clerks are no more clerks but vergers; and as a Yorkshireman remarked, “Verging is a very honourable profession.”

The portrait of John Gray, sometime clerk in Eton College Chapel, taken in his gown as he stood in his desk, has been engraved, and is well known to old Etonians.