cials, who had just ranged themselves in front of the organ-screen, to usher the dean and choristers into the choir, started forward, one from each side of the door, and, with no little gesticulatory emphasis, ordered me to take off my hat. "Off hat, sir! off hat!" angrily exclaimed the one. "Take off your hat, sir!" said the other, in a steady, energetic, determined tone, still less resistible. The peccant beaver at once sunk by my side, and I apologized. "Ah, a Scotchman!" ejaculated the keener official of the two, his cheek meanwhile losing some of the hastily-summoned red; "I thought as much." The officials had scarcely resumed their places beside the screen, when Dean and Sub-dean, the Canons Residentiary and the Archdeacon, the Prebendaries and the Vicars Choral, entered the building in their robes, and, with step slow and stately, disappeared through the richly-fretted entrance of the choir. A purple curtain fell over the opening behind them, as the last figure in the procession passed in; while a few lay saunterers, who had come to be edified by the great organ, found access by another door, which opened into one of the aisles.
The presiding churchman, on the occasion, was Dean Cockburn,—a tall, portly old man, fresh-complexioned and silvery-haired, and better fitted than most men to enact the part of an imposing figure in a piece of impressive ceremony. I looked at the dean with some little interest; he had been twice before the public during the previous five years,—once as a dealer in church offices, for which grave offence he had been deprived by his ecclesiastical superior, the archbishop, but reponed by the queen,—and once as a redoubtable asserter of what he deemed Bible cosmogony, against the facts of the geologists. The old blood-boltered barons who lived in the times of the Crusades used to make all square with Heaven, when particularly aggrieved in their consciences, by slaying a few scores of
