“So that,” replied the Dean blandly, “not only this our craft is in danger to be set at naught, but also that the temple of the great goddess Diana should be despised.”
It was at that same northern fane that a recently appointed verger, who had left a good place to assume his gown, on being invited by his exceedingly respectable master to return, said, “I had rather be a doorkeeper in the house of my God, than to dwell in the tents of ungodliness.” It was in a still more remote cathedral that the old verger, on being informed by the canon that the stranger whom he was showing round was an Ecclesiastical Commissioner, one of the family of Shalmaneser, hastily moved to the visitor’s right side, and explained that he kept his money in the pocket which he thus removed out of danger.
But all these and many other equally veracious anecdotes did my host affiliate on Sudchester, and I said no word of reproof. All vergers work on the same principle, that the cathedral exists for their benefit, and that they should be supreme. It follows that vergers’ stories are interchangeable.
He had stories of parish clerks, which in like manner he localised in the adjacent parishes. Most of them are in print, but one purely Cheshire story, dating from 1866, has possibly been forgotten, even in the county. I will risk it after forty-two years.
It was at the time of the cattle plague, when Cheshire farmers were threatened with absolute ruin, that in a country church one afternoon the choir burst into a pathetic hymn, of which I remember only one verse:
“There’s not a cow, or ox, or beast,
But takes it out of hand;
And soon we’ll have no beasts at all
To dwell within the land.”
The farmers wept bitterly, and said it was too touching: but the Rector said to the clerk, when they got into the vestry, “Why, Thomas, what was that psalm you were singing? Was it one of David’s?”
“Deevid!” said the clerk in bitter scorn, “Deevid never wrote hanythink loike that in hall ’is born dees: that wur a bit of moy puttin’ tergether.”
I remember how I pleased the old man by capping his story with a Midland counties’ story, told me by the vicar concerned therein:
They had begun the Athanasian Creed, and in the front seat, right before the old three-decker of pulpit, reading-desk, and clerk’s pew, stood an old man searching in vain for the unaccustomed formulary. The vicar hastily whispered to the clerk below him, “Find his place.” The clerk obeyed, and then half-turning round muttered with withering contempt: