force of circumstances into an organist, will accompany the alacrity of
your departure after the blessing, by a sacred minuet or an easy
'Gloria'.

Immense improvement! says the well-regulated mind, which unintermittingly
rejoices in the New Police, the Tithe Commutation Act, the penny-post,
and all guarantees of human advancement, and has no moments when
conservative-reforming intellect takes a nap, while imagination does a
little Toryism by the sly, revelling in regret that dear, old, brown,
crumbling, picturesque inefficiency is everywhere giving place to
spick-and-span new-painted, new-varnished efficiency, which will yield
endless diagrams, plans, elevations, and sections, but alas! no picture.
Mine, I fear, is not a well-regulated mind: it has an occasional
tenderness for old abuses; it lingers with a certain fondness over the
days of nasal clerks and top-booted parsons, and has a sigh for the
departed shades of vulgar errors. So it is not surprising that I recall
with a fond sadness Shepperton Church as it was in the old days, with its
outer coat of rough stucco, its red-tiled roof, its heterogeneous windows
patched with desultory bits of painted glass, and its little flight of
steps with their wooden rail running up the outer wall, and leading to
the school-children's gallery.

Then inside, what dear old quaintnesses! which I began to look at with
delight, even when I was so crude a members of the congregation, that my
nurse found it necessary to provide for the reinforcement of my
devotional patience by smuggling bread-and-butter into the sacred
edifice. There was the chancel, guarded by two little cherubims looking
uncomfortably squeezed between arch and wall, and adorned with the
escutcheons of the Oldinport family, which showed me inexhaustible
possibilities of meaning in their blood-red hands, their death's-heads