Part 28 (1/2)

”Life is but a winter's day; Some breakfast and away, Others to dinner stop and are full fed, The oldest man but sups and goes to bed.”

He was a genuine old Dalesman of a type pa.s.sed away. His spirits really never survived the abolition of the stringed instruments in the western gallery with its galaxy of village musicians. ”I hugged ba.s.s fiddle for many a year,” he once told me. Peace be to his memory.

Canon Atkinson tells of his good and harmless but ”f.e.c.kless” parish clerk and schoolmaster at Danby, whom, when about to take a funeral, he discovered sitting in the sunny embrasure of the west window, with his hat on, of course, and comfortably smoking his pipe. The clerk was a brother of the old vicar of Danby, and they seem to have been a curious and irreverent pair. The historian of Danby, in his _Forty Years in a Moorland Parish_, fully describes his first visit to the clerk's school, and the strange custom of weird singing at funerals to which Mr.

Jenkins alludes.

Another north-country clerk-schoolmaster was obliged to relinquish his scholastic duties and make way for a certified teacher. One day he heard the new master tell his pupils: ”'A' is an indefinite article. 'A' is one, and can only be applied to one thing. You cannot say a cats or a dogs; but only a cat, a dog.” The clerk at once reported the matter to his rector. ”Here's a pretty fellow you've got to keep school! He says that you can only apply the article 'a' to nouns of the singular number; and here have I been singing 'A--men' all my life, and your reverence has never once corrected me.”

Communicated by Mrs. Williamson, Lydgate Vicarage:

The old parish clerk of Radcliffe was secretary of the races committee, and would hurry out of church to attend these meetings. Mr. Foxley, the rector, was told of this weakness of his clerk, so one Wednesday evening, when the rector knew there was a meeting, he got into the pulpit (a three-decker was then in the church), and began his sermon.

Half an hour went by, then the clerk began to be restless. Another half-hour pa.s.sed; the clerk looked up from his seat under the pulpit, but still the rector went on preaching. It was too late then for the race-course meeting. So when the sermon was at length finished, the clerk got up and gave out ”the 'undred and nineteenth Psalm from yend to yend. He's preached all day, and we'll sing all neet” (night).

At Westhoughton Church, Lancas.h.i.+re, there was a clerk of the old school, one Platt, who just before the sermon would stretch his long arm and offer his snuff-box to his old friend Betty, and to other cronies who happened to be in his immediate neighbourhood.

The clerk at Stratfieldsaye, who was a character, once astonished a strange clergyman who was taking the duty. The choir sat in the gallery, and the numbers were few on that Sunday. ”Mon I 'elp them chaps? they be terrible few,” said the clerk. The clergyman quite agreed that he should render them his valuable a.s.sistance, and sit in the gallery. Presently a man came in late, and was kneeling down to say his private prayer, when the clergyman was horrified to see the clerk deliberately rise in the gallery and throw a book at the man's head. When remonstrated with after service the clerk replied carelessly, ”Oh, it were only my way o'

telling him to sing up, as we were terrible short this marning.”

CHAPTER XXI

CURIOUS STORIES

The old clerk of Clapham, Bedford, Mr. Thomas Maddams, always used to read his own version of Psalm x.x.xix. 12: ”Like as it were a moth fretting in a garment.” Apparently his idea was of a moth annoyed at being in a garment from which it could not escape.

A parish clerk (who prided himself upon being well read) occupied his seat below the old ”three-decker” pulpit, and whenever a quotation or an extract from the cla.s.sics was introduced into the sermon he, in an undertone, muttered its source, much to the annoyance of the preacher and amus.e.m.e.nt of the congregation. Despite all protests in private, the thing continued, until one day, the vicar's patience being exhausted, he leant over the pulpit side and immediately exclaimed, ”Drat you; shut up!” Immediately, in the clerk's usual sententious tone, came the reply, ”His own.” (William Haggard, _Liverpool Daily Post_.)

N.B. I have heard this story before, and in a different key:

The preacher was a young, b.u.mptious fellow, fond of quoting the cla.s.sics, etc. One day a learned cla.s.sic scholar attended his service, and was heard to say, after each quotation, ”That's Horace,” ”That's Plato,” and such-like, until the preacher was at his ”wits' ends” how to quiet the man. At last, leaning over the pulpit, he looked the man in the face, and is reported to have said, ”Who the devil are you?” ”That's his own!” was the prompt response.

In one of the village churches near Honiton, in 1864, the usual duet between the parson and clerk had been the custom, when the vicar appealed to the congregation to take their part. In a little while they took courage, and did so. This annoyed the clerk, and he could not make the responses, and made so many mistakes that the vicar drew his attention to the matter. He replied, with much irritation, ”How can _I_ do the service with a lot of men and women a-buzzing and a-fizzing about me?”

A somewhat similar story is told of another church:

An old gentleman, now in his eightieth year, remembers attending Romford Church when a youth, and says that at that time (1840) the parish clerk was a person who greatly magnified his office. On one occasion he checked the young man for audibly responding, on the ground that he, the clerk, was the person to respond audibly, and that other people were to respond inaudibly.