Nor was the vestry itself more inviting. Gloomy and low-ceiled,
the plaster of its walls, soddened and discoloured from the
moisture of the moors, lay peeling off in ragged strips, while its
oozing floor of flags seemed to tell of sweating corpses in their
narrow beds beneath.

Through a small window, across which a spider had woven its web, a
shaft of sunlight lay tremulous with the dance of multitudinous
motes; and, falling on the dust-covered table, lighted up with its
halo a corroded pen and stained stone jar, half filled with
congealed ink.

On the right of this window stood a cupboard, with its panels of
dark oak, behind which lay the parchments and papers of the
Rehoboth Church--parchments and papers whose inscriptions were
fast fading, whose textures were fast rotting--companioning in
their decay the decay of the creeds they sought to preserve and
proclaim.

It was to this cupboard Mr. Morell turned, taking therefrom two
time-stained, leather-bound volumes--the one a record of the
interments of the past hundred years, the other containing the roll
of Rehoboth communicants since the establishment of the Church.
Laying the former aside, he took up the latter with a tenderness
and devoutness becoming one who was touching the sacred books of
some fetish of the East. It was, indeed, to him a book to be
reverenced; and as he slowly and sadly turned over its time-stained
pages, his eye rested on many names entered in his own small
handwriting--names which carried him back to companionship with
lives for ever past. Some he had known from birth to death,