Page:Life's little ironies (1894).pdf/253

for though the congregation down in the body of the churoh had a stove to keep off the frost, the players in the gallery had nothing at all. So Nicholas said at morning service, when ’twas freezing an inch an honr, ‘Please the Lord I won't stand this numbing weather no longer; this afternoon we'll have something in our insides to make us warm if it cost a king’s ransom.’

“So he brought a galion of hot brandy and beer, ready mixed, to church with him in the afternoon, and by keeping the jar well wrapped up in Timothy Thomas’s basa- viol bag it kept drinkably warm till they wanted it, which was just a thimbleful in the Absolution, and another after the Creed, and the remainder at the beginning o° the sermon, When they’d had the last pull they felt quite comfortable and warm, and as the sermon went on—moat unfortunately for em it was a long one that afternoon—they fell asleep, every man jack of ’em; and there they slept on as sound as rocks.

‘Twas a very dark afternoon, and by the end of the sermon all you could see of the inside of the church were the pa’son’s two candles alongside of him in the pulpit, and his spaking face behind ’em. The sermon being ended at last, the pa’son gie’d out the Evening Hymn. But no choir set about sounding up the tune, and the people began to turn their heads to learn the reason why, and then Levi Limpet,a boy who aat in the gallery, nudged Timothy and Nicholas, and said, ‘Begin! begin!’

““Hey, what? says Nicholas, starting up; and the church being so dark and his head so muddled he thought he was at the party they had played at all the night before, and away he went, bow and fiddle, at ‘The Devil among the Tailors,’ the favorite jig of our neighborhood at that time. The rest of the band,