Within that sacred but graceless edifice, the rigors of the hour and
occasion reached their climax. The shivering gas-jets lit up the austere
pallor of the bare walls, and the hollow, shell-like sweep of colorless
vacuity behind the cold communion table. The chill of despair and
hopeless renunciation was in the air, untempered by any glow from
the sealed air-tight stove that seemed only to bring out a lukewarm
exhalation of wet clothes and cheaply dyed umbrellas. Nor did the
presence of the worshippers themselves impart any life to the dreary
apartment. Scattered throughout the white pews, in dull, shapeless,
neutral blotches, rigidly separated from each other, they seemed only
to accent the colorless church and the emptiness of all things. A few
children, who had huddled together for warmth in one of the back
benches and who had became glutinous and adherent through moisture, were
laboriously drawn out and painfully picked apart by a watchful deacon.

The dry, monotonous disturbance of the bell had given way to the strain
of a bass viol, that had been apparently pitched to the key of the east
wind without, and the crude complaint of a new harmonium that seemed to
bewail its limited prospect of ever becoming seasoned or mellowed in its
earthly tabernacle, and then the singing began. Here and there a human
voice soared and struggled above the narrow text and the monotonous
cadence with a cry of individual longing, but was borne down by the
dull, trampling precision of the others' formal chant. This and
a certain muffled raking of the stove by the sexton brought the
temperature down still lower. A sermon, in keeping with the previous
performance, in which the chill east wind of doctrine was not tempered
to any shorn lamb within that dreary fold, followed. A spark of human
and vulgar interest was momentarily kindled by the collection and the
simultaneous movement of reluctant hands towards their owners' pockets;
but the coins fell on the baize-covered plates with a dull thud, like