“This is to give notice! as there won’t be no sarmon, nor no more service this mornin’, so you’d better all go whum (home); and there won’t be no sarvice this afternoon, as the rector ain’t got his artful teeth back from the dentist!”

This story so amused George Cruikshank that he wanted to make an illustration of it.  But the journal in which it ought to have appeared was very short-lived.  Hence Cruikshank’s drawing was lost to the world.

The clerk is a firm upholder of established custom.  “We will now sing the evening hymn,” said the rector of an East Anglian church in the sixties.  “No, sir, it’s doxology to-night.”  The preacher again said, “We’ll sing the evening hymn.”  The clerk, however, persisted, “It’s doxology to-night”; and doxology it was, in spite of the parson’s protests.

In the days when parish notices with reference to the lost, stolen, or strayed animals were read out in church at the commencement of the service, the clerk of a church [my informant has forgotten the name of the parish] rose in his place and said: 

“This is to give notice that my Lady ——­ has lost her little dog; he comes to the name of Shock; he is all white except two patches of black on his sides and he has got—­eh?—­what?—­yes—­no—­upon my soul he has got four eyes!” It should have been sore eyes, but the long s had misled the clerk.

The clerk does not always shine as an orator, but a correspondent who writes from the Charterhouse can vouch for the following effort of one who lived in a village not a hundred miles from Harrow about thirty years ago.

There was a tea for the school children, at which the clerk, a farm labourer, spoke thus:  “You know, my friends, that if we wants to get a good crop of anything we dungs the ground.  Now what I say is, if we wants our youngsters to crop properly, we must see that they are properly dunged—–­ put the larning into them like dung, and they’ll do all right.”

The subject of the Disestablishment of the Church was scarcely contemplated by a clerk in the diocese of Peterborough, who, after the amalgamation of two parishes, stated that he was desired by the vicar to announce that the services in each parish would be morning and evening to all eternity.  It is thought that he meant to say alternately.

I have often referred to the ancient clerkly method of giving out the hymns.  It was a terrible blow to the clerk when the parsons began to interfere with his prerogative and give out the hymns themselves.  All clerks did not revenge themselves on the usurpers of their ancient right as did one of their number, who was very indignant when a strange clergyman insisted on giving out the hymns himself.  In due course he gave out “the fifty-third hymn,” when out popped the old clerk’s head from under the red curtains which hung round the gallery, and which gave him the appearance of wearing a nightcap, and he shouted, “That a baint!  A be the varty-zeventh.”