‘That is not fair, Kate,’ said Helen; ’you know it is sometimes very hard work to hear Edward read; and besides, Mamma had desired Lizzie to sit still in the house, because she had been at the church ever since five, helping Papa to settle the velvet on the pulpit after the people had put it on wrong.’

‘You would not imagine, Anne,’ said Elizabeth, ’how fearfully deficient the world is, in common sense.  Would you believe it, the workmen actually put the pulpit-cloth on with the embroidery upside-down, and I believe we were five hours setting it right again.’

‘Without any breakfast?’ said Anne.

’Oh! we had no time to think of breakfast till Mr. Somerville came in at ten o’clock to see what was going on, and told us how late it was,’ said Elizabeth.

By this time, they had reached the brow of the hill, from whence they had a fine view of Abbeychurch, old and new.  Anne observed upon the difference between the two divisions of the town.

‘Yes,’ said Elizabeth, ’our town consists of the remains of old respectable England, and the beginning of the new great work-shop of all nations, met together in tolerably close companionship.  I could almost grudge that beautiful Gothic church to those regular red-brick uniform rows of deformity.’

’I do not think even the new church can boast of more beauty than St. Mary’s,’ said Anne.

‘No, and it wants the handiwork of that best artist, old Time,’ said Elizabeth; ’it will be long before Queen Victoria’s head on the corbel at the new church is of as good a colour as Queen Eleanor’s at the old one, and we never shall see anything so pretty at St. Austin’s as the yellow lichen cap, and plume of spleen-wort feathers, which Edward the First wears.’

‘How beautiful the old church tower is!’ said Anne, turning round to look at it; ’and the gable ends of your house, and the tall trees of the garden, with the cloistered alms-houses, have still quite a monastic air.’

’If you only look at the tower with its intersecting arches and their zig-zag mouldings,’ said Elizabeth, ’and shut your eyes to our kitchen chimney, on which rests all the fame of the Vicar before last.’

‘What can you mean?’ said Anne.

’That when anyone wishes to distinguish the Reverend Hugh Puddington from all other Vicars of Abbeychurch, his appellation is “The man that built the kitchen chimney."’

‘That being, I suppose, the only record he has left behind him,’ said Anne.

‘The only one now existing,’ said Elizabeth, ’since Papa has made his great horrid pew in the chancel into open seats.—­Do not you remember it, Kate? and how naughty you used to be, when Margaret left off sitting there with us, and there was no one to see what we were about—­oh! and there is a great fat Patience on a monument on the wall over our heads, and a very long inscription, recording things quite as unsuitable to a clergyman.’