The View from the Parsonage

ove the altar, which with its wooden Jacobean rail was occulted from the south by a three-decker pulpit, while at the west end a gallery sagged over the box-pews, dispensing rustic music from on high, with a choir of village boys whose broad Kentish vowels must have brought our services closer than most others to the original English of the Book of Common Prayer.

The only drawback to this survival of characteristic Anglicanism among all the denatured churches of the Weald, with their choirstalls and reredoses and general air of Mediaevalism and water, was the state of the Manor pew, which proclaimed its emptiness in a way it would never have done had it been, as elsewhere, a mere bench among many. It was to all appearances a room, equipped with a stove, a central table and cushioned seats along the walls. It must have covered at least a sixth of the entire floor-space, and to my conscious eye its yawning vacancy made the church look sparsely filled even when all the other pews were occupied. Sometimes