and cross-bones, their leopards' paws, and Maltese crosses. There were
inscriptions on the panels of the singing-gallery, telling of
benefactions to the poor of Shepperton, with an involuted elegance of
capitals and final flourishes, which my alphabetic erudition traced with
ever-new delight. No benches in those days; but huge roomy pews, round
which devout church-goers sat during 'lessons', trying to look anywhere
else than into each other's eyes. No low partitions allowing you, with a
dreary absence of contrast and mystery, to see everything at all moments;
but tall dark panels, under whose shadow I sank with a sense of
retirement through the Litany, only to feel with more intensity my burst
into the conspicuousness of public life when I was made to stand up on
the seat during the psalms or the singing. And the singing was no
mechanical affair of official routine; it had a drama. As the moment of
psalmody approached, by some process to me as mysterious and untraceable
as the opening of the flowers or the breaking-out of the stars, a slate
appeared in front of the gallery, advertising in bold characters the
psalm about to be sung, lest the sonorous announcement of the clerk
should still leave the bucolic mind in doubt on that head. Then followed
the migration of the clerk to the gallery, where, in company with a
bassoon, two key-bugles, a carpenter understood to have an amazing power
of singing 'counter', and two lesser musical stars, he formed the
complement of a choir regarded in Shepperton as one of distinguished
attraction, occasionally known to draw hearers from the next parish. The
innovation of hymn-books was as yet undreamed of; even the New Version
was regarded with a sort of melancholy tolerance, as part of the common
degeneracy in a time when prices had dwindled, and a cotton gown was no
longer stout enough to last a lifetime; for the lyrical taste of the best
heads in Shepperton had been formed on Sternhold and Hopkins. But the
greatest triumphs of the Shepperton choir were reserved for the Sundays
when the slate announced an ANTHEM, with a dignified abstinence from