Suppose I am sitting there now while I say one word for our congregations in winter.  I was very particular in having the church well warmed before Sunday.  I think some parsons must neglect seeing after this matter on principle, because warmth may make a weary creature go to sleep here and there about the place:  as if any healing doctrine could enter the soul while it is on the rack of the frost.  The clergy should see—­for it is their business—­that their people have no occasion to think of their bodies at all while they are in church.  They have enough ado to think of the truth.  When our Lord was feeding even their bodies, He made them all sit down on the grass.  It is worth noticing that there was much grass in the place—­a rare thing I should think in those countries—­and therefore, perhaps, it was chosen by Him for their comfort in feeding their souls and bodies both.  If I may judge from experiences of my own, one of the reasons why some churches are of all places the least likely for anything good to be found in, is, that they are as wretchedly cold to the body as they are to the soul—­too cold every way for anything to grow in them.  Edelweiss, “Noble-white”—­as they call a plant growing under the snow on some of the Alps—­could not survive the winter in such churches.  There is small welcome in a cold house.  And the clergyman, who is the steward, should look to it.  It is for him to give his Master’s friends a welcome to his Master’s house—­for the welcome of a servant is precious, and now-a-days very rare.

And now Mrs Stone must have finished.  I go into the old church which looks as if it were quietly waiting for its people.  No.  She has not done yet.  Never mind.—­How full of meaning the vaulted roof looks! as if, having gathered a soul of its own out of the generations that have worshipped here for so long, it had feeling enough to grow hungry for a psalm before the end of the week.

Some such half-foolish fancy was now passing through my tranquillized mind or rather heart—­for the mind would have rejected it at once—­when to my—­what shall I call it?—­not amazement, for the delight was too strong for amazement—­the old organ woke up and began to think aloud.  As if it had been brooding over it all the week in the wonderful convolutions of its wooden brain, it began to sigh out the Agnus Dei of Mozart’s twelfth mass upon the air of the still church, which lay swept and garnished for the Sunday.—­How could it be?  I know now; and I guessed then; and my guess was right; and my reader must be content to guess too.  I took no step to verify my conjecture, for I felt that I was upon my honour, but sat in one of the pews and listened, till the old organ sobbed itself into silence.  Then I heard the steps of the sexton’s wife vanish from the church, heard her lock the door, and knew that I was alone in the ancient pile, with the twilight growing thick about me, and felt like Sir Galahad, when, after the “rolling