"Croap, croap, croap!" chuckled the sexton. "That take every mortal thing I eat. An' doctor can't do nothun for me—not he!"
"I should think he couldn't."
"Why, I do declare he be croapun now! That fare to bring me to my own grave afore long. Do you listen, Mr. Jones; that croap like billy-oh this very minute!"
It took a rough word to get rid of him.
"You be off, Busby. Can't you see I'm trying to listen to something else?"
In the church the rector was reciting the first of the appointed psalms. Every syllable could be heard upon the path. His reading was Mr. Carlton's least disputed gift, thanks to a fine voice, an unerring sense of the values of words, and a delivery without let or blemish. Yet there was no evidence that the reader felt a word of what he read, for one and all were pitched in the deliberate monotone rarely to be heard outside a church. And just where some voices would have failed, that of the Rector of Long Stow rang clearest and most precise:
"When thou with rebukes dost chasten man for sin, thou makest his beauty to consume away, like as it were a moth fretting a garment: every man therefore is but vanity.
"Hear my prayer, O Lord, and with thine ears consider my calling: hold not thy peace at my tears.
"For I am a stranger with thee: and a sojourner, as all my fathers were.
"O spare me a little, that I may recover my strength: before I go hence, and be no more seen . . ."