short sermons telling his congregation not to tell lies nor be unkind to one another.  Every now and then he introduced into his discourses his one favourite subject, astronomy, and by degrees the labourers in Marston-Cocking knew more about the sky and its daily and nightly changes than many a highly educated person in the city.  Mr. Armstrong, otherwise a very plain, simple creature, always grew eloquent on the common ignorance of the heavens.  “Here,” he would say, “has God thrust upon us these marvellous sights.  These are not the secrets hidden in the mine—­they are forced upon us; and yet we walk with our heads to the earth; we do not know the morning star when we see it, nor can we even recognise the Pleiads and Arcturus which Job knew.”  Mr. Armstrong had made all his instruments with his own hands, and had even used the top of the church-tower as an observatory.  Mrs. Bullen, the wife of the one farmer in the parish, a lady who wrote the finest of Italian pointed hands, who had been in a Brighton boarding-school for ten years, and had been through “Keith on the Use of the Globes,” was much scandalised at this “appropriation of the sacred edifice to secular purposes,” as she called it, but she met with no encouragement.  The poor people somehow connected heaven with the stars, and Mr. Armstrong never undeceived them, so that they saw nothing improper in the big telescope under the weathercock.

“Really, James,” said Mrs. Bullen one morning to Mr. Armstrong’s gardener and general man-of-all-work as he was carrying a chair from the house into the tower, “do you think this is quite right?  Do you think our Saviour would have sanctioned the erection of a profane instrument over the house of prayer?”

James was very thick-headed, and hardly knew the meaning of these long words, bat he did not like Mrs. Bullen, and he resented her talking to him, a servant, in that strain about his master.

“Ah!  Mrs. Bullen, you needn’t bother yourself.  He’s all right with the Saviour,—­more so nor many other people, maybe.”

“Well, but, James, this is a church consecrated to the service of God.”

“Ah! how do you know?  Very likely o’ nights—­for he’s up there when you’re abed and asleep—­he’s a looking into heaven through that there glass, and, sees God and the blessed angels.”

“Really, James, can you be so ignorant as not to know that God is a Spirit?  I am astonished at you.”  And Mrs. Bullen passed on without a single doubt in her mind that there was a single weak spot in her creed, or that anybody could question its intelligibility and coherence who would not also question the multiplication-table.  She told her husband when she got home that it was really dreadful to think that the poor had such low views of the Divine Being.  How degraded!  No wonder they were so immoral.  Bullen, however, did not trouble himself much about these matters.  He assented to what his wife said, but then he called “spirit” “sperrit,” to her annoyance, and she could not get him to comprehend what she meant by “entirely immaterial,” although it was so plain.