The Argosy — page 109: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

Q4 Lady Valera. coat of a bell whose many sins might well have cracked it. A bell that had rung ‘‘ for joye” at the execution of Mary Queen of Scots, and later on had rung back King James from Faversham, and rung in King William from Holland with equal enthusiasm. The body of the church had been restored by some unknown follower of Wren, in humble imitation of a classic temple. Bald and uninteresting without, within it was dingily magnificent with dark wood-work and tarnished gilding. A great, black, undecipherable altar-piece, devoutly believed in as a Carlo Maratti, was surmounted by two smirking gilded angels, between which a dilapidated pelican pecked at her tarnished breast, under a mean window containing the arms of the Worshipful Company of Cheesemongers. Mr. Paramount, the little old Churchwarden, still speaks of St. Fri- dolin’s as an interior unequalled in its chaste magnificence and solemn splendour since the days of Solomon’s Temple. It was, therefore, somewhat of a shock to him, after making it his duty to explain to the new Vicar that he should resolutely oppose any modern Ritualistic in- movations or decorations, crosses, altar lights, or flowers, which he protested against as ‘‘ unlicensed ornament and unauthorised symbol,” to have his attention rather sharply directed to the pelican, the window with ‘‘ Azure, three cheeses in dexter chief Or, &c.,” and the three colossal Christian Graces, adorning the monument to a departed Vicar, and to be asked where he found “ unlicensed ornament and unauthorised symbol” if not here? He retreated from the discussion silenced if not exactly convinced, and Eustace wondered for a day and a half what he could possibly have said to affront the old gentleman. Close by the church, within the churchyard bounds, stood the Vicarage, in which no Vicar had dwelt for generations. It was a dreary abode, with faded paintings and dusty carvings, with shut-up rooms, ghostly with the relics of dead-and-gone occupants, and crooked passages haunted by unaccountable echoes. It suited the Vicar’s work, and perhaps his mood. He furnished as much as he absolutely required, and installed in charge his tidy old housekeeper, Mrs. Good- liffe : to whose orderly soul he brought daily tribulation by never coming in for a regular meal, and encouraging the inroads of all sorts of undesirable parishioners over her snowy doorsteps and immaculate oil-cloth. Here, as the year rolled on, he lived his busy mo- notonous, unjoyous life, as secluded from human intercourse beyond the parish bounds as if he had been the original Fridolin the Anker (z.e., hermit), who, as the parish records told, built the church and his cell in the marshes adjoining four centuries ago. Now according to all precedent no hermit’s existence could be considered complete without the temptations of emissaries from the outer world striving by lure and guile to win back their lost companion. These were not lacking to Mr. Stannard had he found time or inclina- tion to heed them. There followed him at first a certain influx of CORnNIECLOOKS (EO)