and its great antiquity. We broke up at a sober hour, each member
being charged to present himself at the vestry at nine in the morning
on that day week, under the penalty of half-a-guinea.

It would have suited my interests very well, when the day came round,
to have forfeited my half-guinea, and have attended exclusively to my
own business; but judging it more to my credit to go through with the
work I had undertaken, I was at my post, together with several of my
colleagues, before the hour had struck. Some of our members did not
come at all the first day, but sent their half-guineas; others, having
to come in from the suburbs before omnibus-time, arrived too late, and
were fined in smaller sums for the breach of punctuality. Our party
being at length complete, to the number of ten, we indue our cloaks,
and, pioneered by the ward-beadle with his ponderous mace, we sally
forth to feel the charitable pulse of several parishes. Ten good men
and true, swathed to the chin in voluminous folds of broad-cloth
fringed with fur, and headed by the ample proportions of the
mace-bearer in scarlet and cloth of gold; our apparition, and our
mission too, were plainly a mystery to the major part of the
population, who, seeing us but once a year, and then but momentarily,
as the procession emerges suddenly from one door to plunge into
another, do not very well know what to make of it. 'Is that there a
buryin' or a marryin'?' 'What's that lot o' fellows after?' 'What's up
now, Jem?'--such are a few of the inquiries which from time to time
testified the astonishment of the uninitiated; to all of which our
imperturbable leader opposed a face as impenetrable as that of the
sphinx of the desert. We should have been sadly at a loss, by the way,
without him. He knew every soul in the whole ward who would come down
to the extent of a sixpence for the sake of the poor; and he led his
small phalanx boldly to the charge through all impediments. Under his