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Miss E. Lloyd, of Woodburn, Crowborough, writes:
About the year 1833 a gentleman bought an estate in North Yorkshire,
seven miles from any town, and built a house there. The parish was
small, having a population of about a hundred souls, the church old and
tumbledown, reeking with damp; the rain came through the roof; the seats
were worm-eaten, and centipedes, with other like vermin, roamed about
them near the wall. The vicar was non-resident, and an elderly
curate-in-charge ministered to this parish and another in the
neighbourhood. The customs of the church were much the same as those
described by Canon Atkinson in his _Forty Years in a Moorland Parish_ as
existing on his arrival at Danby. There was no vestry. The surplice
(washed twice a year) was hung over the altar rails, within which the
curate robed, his hat or any parcel he happened to have in his hand
being put down for the time on the Holy Table. The men sat for the most
part together, the farmers and young men in the singing-loft, the
labourers below, and the women in front. The wife of the chief yeoman
farmer--an excellent and superior woman--still kept up the habit of
"making a reverence" to the altar before she entered her pew. The
surplice, which hung in the church all through the week, was apt to get
very damp. On one occasion, when a strange clergyman staying at the Hall
took the service, he declined to wear it, as it was so wet.
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