“We might be tidier, mightn’t we, sir?” said the cheerful clerk; “but when you’re in a lost corner of a place like this, what are you to do? Why, look here now, just look at these packing-cases. There they’ve been, for a year or more, ready to go down to London—there they are, littering the place, and there they’ll stop as long as the nails hold them together. I’ll tell you what, sir, as I said before, this is not London. We are all asleep here. Bless you, we don’t march with the times!”
“What is there in the packing-cases?” I asked.
“Bits of old wood carvings from the pulpit, and panels from the chancel, and images from the organ-loft,” said the clerk. “Portraits of the twelve apostles in wood, and not a whole nose among ’em. All broken, and worm-eaten, and crumbling to dust at the edges. As brittle as crockery, sir, and as old as the church, if not older.”
“And why were they going to London? To be repaired?”
“That’s it, sir, to be repaired, and where they were past repair, to be copied in sound wood. But, bless you, the money fell short, and there they