VI. HARNESS THE HORSES; AND GET UP, YE HORSEMEN, AND STAND FORTH WITH III. ALL YE INHABITANTS OF THE WORLD, and DWELLERS ON THE EARTH, SEE YE, WHEN WHEN IT WAS DARK CHAPTER I AN INCIDENT BY WAY OF PROLOGUE R. HINCHCLIFFE, the sexton, looked up as Mr. MR. Philemon, the clerk, unlocked the great gates of open ironwork which led into the street. Hinchcliffe was cutting the lettering on a tombstone, supported by heavy wooden trestles, under a little shed close to the vestry door of the church. The clerk, a small, rotund man, clerical in aspect, and wearing a round felt hat, pulled out a large, oldfashioned watch. Time for the bell, William," he said. 66 The parish church was a large building in sham perpendicular. It stood in a very central position on the Manchester main road, rising amid a bare triangle of flat gravestones, and separated from the street pavement only by high iron railings. It was about half-past four on a dull autumn afternoon. The trams swung ringing down the black, muddy road, and the long procession of great two-wheeled carts, painted vermilion, carried coal from the collieries six miles away to the great mills and factories of Salford. The two men went into the church, and soon the tolling of a deep-voiced bell, high up in the pall of smoke which lay over the houses, beat out in regular and melancholy sound. Inside the building the noise of the traffic sank into a long, unceasing note like the bourdon note of a distant organ. Hinchcliffe tolled the bell in the dim, ugly vestibule with his foot in a loop in the rope, sitting on the chest which held the dozen loaves which were given away every Sunday to the old women in the free seats. The clerk opened the green baize swing-doors and strode up the aisle towards the vestry, waking mournful echoes as the nails in his boots struck the tiled floor. Saint Thomas's Church, the mother church of Walktown, was probably the ugliest church in Lancashire. The heavy galleries, the drab walls, the terrible gloom of the vast structure, all spoke eloquently of a chilly, dour Christianity, a grudging and suspicious Sunday religion which animated its congregation. In the long rows of cushioned seats, each labelled with the name of the person who rented it, Sunday by Sunday the moderately prosperous and wholly vulgar Lancashire people sat for two hours. During the prayers they leaned forward in easy and comfortable concession to convention. Few ever knelt. During the hymn times they stood up in their places listening carefully to a fine choir of men and women-a choir which, despite its vocal excellence, was only allowed to perform the most stodgy and commonplace evangelical music. When the incumbent preached he was heard with the jealous watchfulness which often assails an educated man. The renters of the pews desired a Low Church aspect of doctrine and were intelligent to detect any divergence from it. The colour of the building was sombre. The brickred and styx-like grey of the flooring, the lifeless choc |