It crowned my satisfaction when I found that there was to be a collection.  The hymn to which the churchwardens moved about, gathering the pence, whose numbers and noisiness seemed in keeping with the rest of the service, was a well-known one to us all.  It was the favourite evening hymn of the district.  I knew every syllable of it, for Jem and I always sang hymns (and invariably this one) with my dear mother, on Sunday evening after supper.  When we were good, we liked it, and, picking one favourite after another, we often sang nearly through the hymn-book.  When we were naughty, we displayed a good deal of skill in making derisive faces behind my mother’s back, as she sat at the piano, without betraying ourselves, and in getting our tongues out and in again during the natural pauses and convolutions of the tune.  But these occasional fits of boyish profanity did not hinder me from having an equally boyish fund of reverence and enthusiasm at the bottom of my heart, and it was with proud and pleasurable emotions that I heard the old clerk give forth the familiar first lines,

     “Soon shall the evening star with silver ray
      Shed its mild lustre o’er this sacred day,”

and got my threepenny-bit ready between my finger and thumb.

Away went the organ, which was played by the vicar’s eldest daughter—­away went the vicar’s second daughter, who “led the singing” from the vicarage pew with a voice like a bird—­away went the choir, which, in spite of surplices, could not be cured of waiting half a beat for her—­and away went the congregation—­young men and maidens, old men and children—­in one broad tide of somewhat irregular harmony.  Isaac did not know the words as well as I did, so I lent him my hymn-book; one result of which was, that the print being small, and the sense of a hymn being in his view a far more important matter than the sound of it, he preached rather than sang—­in an unequal cadence which was perturbing to my more musical ear—­the familiar lines,

     “Still let each awful truth our thoughts engage,
      That shines revealed on inspiration’s page;
      Nor those blest hours in vain amusement waste
      Which all who lavish shall lament at last.”

During the next verse my devotions were a little distracted by the gradual approach of a churchwarden for my threepenny-bit, which was hot with three verses of expectant fingering.  Then, to my relief, he took it, and the bee-master’s contribution, and I felt calmer, and listened to the little prelude which it was always the custom for the organist to play before the final verse of a hymn.  It was also the custom to sing the last verse as loudly as possible, though this is by no means invariably appropriate.  It fitted the present occasion fairly enough.  From where I stood I could see the bellows-blower (the magnetic current of enthusiasm flowed even to the back of the organ) nerve himself to prodigious pumping—­Charlie’s sister drew out