It is surprising how much damage may be done to valuable old woodwork
by an enthusiastic band of decorators, assisted by an indiscriminating
curate, and how inharmonious may be the general effect of individual
labours--though charming taken separately--where a comprehensive
scheme is neglected. I have counted fourteen differing reds--not tones
or shades of the same colour--including the hood of the officiating
clergyman, in one chancel at the same time, bewildering to the eye and
distracting to the mind. And I once saw a beautiful and priceless old
Elizabethan table in a vestry, covered with a mouldy piece of purple
velvet secured with tin-tacks driven into the tortured oak. There are,
or were, two lovely old Chippendale chairs with the characteristic
backs and legs inside the altar-rails of Badsey Church; they are
valuable and no doubt duly appreciated, not only for their own sake,
but because they were the gift of dear old Barnard, the clerk, who
spent fifty years of his life in the service of the church.

I once heard a curate preaching to an agricultural congregation at a
harvest thanksgiving after a disastrous season, when the earth had not
yielded much by way of increase, remarking that in such a time of
scarcity we might be thankful that plenty of foreign corn would be
available; good theology, perhaps, but scarcely expedient under the
circumstances.

We found Sir Thomas Graham Jackson a purist in the matter of church
restoration, and in my capacity as churchwarden and treasurer, I was
fortunate in having to confer with a man of such pre-eminent good
taste. He would not allow some new oak panels, with which we had to
supplement the old linen-pattern panels of the pulpit, to be coloured
to match the old work. "Time," he said, "will bring them all