head of the efficient, accordingly the sexton had knocked away such as were suspended immediately above the altar and step—a place where the step was, beneath the sand; but he did not think it necessary to disturb those in other parts of the church. If they inconvenienced others, it was the penalty of curiosity, coming to see a wedding there. Toward the west end of the church some wooden pewtops stood above the sand, and stuck into a gimlet-hole in the top rail of one was a piece of holly, dry and brown as a chip. It had been put there as a Christmas decoration the last year that the church was used for divine worship, at the feast of Noel; when that was, only the oldest men could remember. The sexton had looked at it several times with his hands in his pockets and considered whether it were worth while pulling his hands out and removing the withered fragment, and carrying it outside the church, but had arrived at the conclusion that it injured no one, and might therefore just as well remain.
There were fragments of stained glass in the windows, in the upper light of the perpendicular windows saints and angels in white and gold on ruby and blue grounds. In one window a fragment of a Christ on the cross. But all were much obscured by cobwebs. The cobwebs, after having entangled many flies, caught and retained many particles of sand, became impervious to light and obscured the figures in the painted glass. The sexton had looked at these cobwebs occasionally and mused whether it would be worth his while to sweep them down, but as he knew that the church was rarely used for divine offices, and never for regular divine worship, he deemed that there was no crying necessity for their destruction. Life was short, and time might be better employed—to whit in talking to a neighbor in smoking a pipe, in drinking a pint of ale, in larruping his wife, in reading the paper. Consequently the cobwebs remained.
Had Mr. Desiderius Mules been possessed of antiquarian tastes, he might have occupied the time he was kept waiting in studying the bosses of carved oak that adorned the wagon-roof of the church, which were in some cases quaint, in the majority beautiful, and no two the same. And he might have puzzled out the meaning of three rabbits with only three ears between them forming a triangle, or three heads united in one neck, a king
