in the midst, before the altar, had been eaten through by rats, emerging from an old grave, and exposed below gnawed and mouldy bones a foot beneath the boards.
A marriage without three "askings" was a novelty in Salcot and Virley sufficient to excite interest in the place; and when that marriage was to take place between one so well known and dreaded as Elijah Rebow and a girl hardly ever seen, but of whom much was spoken, it may well be supposed that Virley Church was crowded with sightseers. The gallery was full to bursting. Sailor -boys in the front amused themselves with dropping broken bits of tobacco-pipe on the heads below, and giggling at the impotent rage of those they hit.
There was a sweep in Salcot, who tenanted a tottering cottage, devoid of furniture. The one room was heaped with straw, and into this the sweep crept at night for his slumbers. This man now appeared at the sacred door.
"Look out, blackie!" shouted those near; "we are not going to be smutted by you."
"Then make way for your superiors."
"Superiors!" sneered a matron near.
"Well, I am your superior," said the sweep, "for my proper place is poking out at the top of a chimney' , and yours is poking into the fire at the bottom. Make way. I have a right to see as well as the best of you."
The crowd contracted on either side in anxiety for their clothes, and the sweep worked his way to the fore.
"I'll have the best place of you all," he said, as the gods in the gallery received him with ironical cries of "Sweep! sweep!"
He charged into the chancel, and sent his black legs over the Communion rails.
At some remote period the chancel of Virley had fallen, and had been rebuilt with timber and bricks on the old walls left to the height of two feet above the floor. As the old walls were four feet thick, and the new walls only the thickness of one brick, the chancel was provided with a low seat all round it, like the cancella of an ancient basilica. The sweep, with a keen eye peering through his soot, had detected this seat and seen that it was unappropriated. He was over the altar with a second jump, and
