The sermon over, the people sprang to their feet like Jacks-in-a-box. With what gusto they sang the evening hymn, and how their lungs expanded and their tongues wagged as they poured out of the churchyard! Not that they resented anything that was said in the Rector’s sermons. They did not listen to them. After the Bloody Cause sermon Laura tried to find out how her elders had reacted to it; but all she could learn was: “I seems to have lost the thread just then,” or, more frankly, “I must’ve been nodding;” the most she could get was one woman’s, “My! didn’t th’ old parson get worked up today!”

Some of them went to church to show off their best clothes and to see and criticize those of their neighbours; some because they loved to hear their own voices raised in the hymns, or because churchgoing qualified them for the Christmas blankets and coals; and a few to worship. There was at least one saint and mystic in that parish and there were several good Christian men and women, but the majority regarded religion as something proper to extreme old age, for which they themselves had as yet no use.

“About time he wer’ thinkin’ about his latter end,” they would say of one who showed levity when his head and beard were white, or of anybody who was ill or afflicted. Once a hunchback from another village came to a pig feast and distinguished himself by getting drunk and using bad language, and, because he was a cripple, his conduct was looked upon with horror. Laura’s mother was distressed when she heard about it. “To think of a poor afflicted creature like that cursing and swearing,” she sighed. “Terrible! Terrible!” and when Edmund, then about ten, looked up from his book and said calmly, “I should think if anybody’s got a right to swear it’s a man with a back like that,” she told him he was nearly as bad to say such a thing.