real geese drilling thereon. Mr. Britling conducted his visitor (through
a lych gate) into the church-yard, and there they found mossy,
tumble-down tombstones, one with a skull and cross-bones upon it, that
went back to the later seventeenth century. In the aisle of the church
were three huge hatchments, and there was a side chapel devoted to the
Mainstay family and the Barons Homartyn, with a series of monuments that
began with painted Tudor effigies and came down to a vast stained glass
window of the vilest commercial Victorian. There were also mediæval
brasses of parish priests, and a marble crusader and his lady of some
extinguished family which had ruled Matching's Easy before the Mainstays
came. And as the two gentlemen emerged from the church they ran against
the perfect vicar, Mr. Dimple, ample and genial, with an embracing laugh
and an enveloping voice. "Come to see the old country," he said to Mr.
Direck. "So Good of you Americans to do that! So Good of you...."

There was some amiable sparring between the worthy man and Mr. Britling
about bringing Mr. Direck to church on Sunday morning. "He's terribly
Lax," said Mr. Dimple to Mr. Direck, smiling radiantly. "Terribly Lax.
But then nowadays Everybody _is_ so Lax. And he's very Good to my Coal
Club; I don't know what we should do without him. So I just admonish
him. And if he doesn't go to church, well, anyhow he doesn't go anywhere
else. He may be a poor churchman, but anyhow he's not a dissenter...."

"In England, you see," Mr. Britling remarked, after they had parted from
the reverend gentleman, "we have domesticated everything. We have even
domesticated God."

For awhile Mr. Britling showed Mr. Direck English lanes, and then came
back along narrow white paths across small fields of rising wheat, to
the village and a little gate that led into the park.