font, which is placed in the centre of the inner perch, and
patronised by about 20 of the rising race every Sunday afternoon,
you will be able to see everybody, whilst nobody can distinctly see
you. As a rule, many people are too fired, or too ill, or too idle,
to go to a place of worship on a Sunday morning, and at our Parish
Church one may plainly notice this. A certain number always put in a
regular appearance. If they did not attend the Parish Church twice a
day they would become apprehensive as to both their temporal
respectability awl spiritual welfare. They are descendants of the
old long-horned stock, and have a mighty notion of the importance of
church-going. Probably they don't care very profoundly for the
sermons; but they have got into a safe-sided, orthodox groove, and
some of them have an idea that they will be saved as much by church-
going as by faith. The members of this class have a large notion of
the respectability of their individual pews and seats. If they
belonged to a family of five hundred each, and if every one of them
had to go to Church every Sunday, they would want their respective
seats, Prayer Books, footstools, and all that sort of thing. They
don't like to see strangers rambling about, in search of a resting
place; they are particularly solemn-looking, and give symptoms of
being on the border of some catastrophe, if an unknown being shows
any disposition to enter their pews. And some of them would see a
person a good deal beyond the ether side of Jordan before they would
think of handing him a Prayer Book. We don't suppose any of them are
so precise as the old gentleman who once, when a stranger entered
his pew, doubled up the cushion, sat upon it in a two-fold state,
and intimated that ordinary beards were good enough for interlopers;
but after all there is much of the "number one" principle in the
devotion of these goodly followers of the saints, and they have been
so long at the game that a cure is impossible.