382 THE PULPIT CANOPY. 



solemn jubilee,, was startled by the truthful declaration that 

 " Riches certainly make for themselves wings/'' a proverbial 

 morality introductive, as might have been anticipated, of a 

 lecture on the vanity of earthly possessions, of a sermon, in 

 short, which the preacher, lost in the absorption of that morn- 

 ing's news, had taken, perhaps inadvertently, perhaps inten- 

 tionally, in place of that he had before designed to use. Per- 

 haps, in the continued prepossession of his mind, he was in- 

 sensible himself to the unseasonableness of his subject, a fact 

 to which the two or three Dives of the parish were especially 

 alive, nor was it even lost entirely on the less sensitive poor, 

 or on two or three strangers from the fishing-town, a nascent 

 bathing-place, adjacent. These latter, however, had come 

 chiefly to take a look at the interior of our village church, 

 which was, in truth, worth looking at, for its remote antiquity, 

 with its low Saxon arches, contrasted by a Gothic few of later 

 erection, and its curious pulpit of carved stone, attached to a 

 side wall of which it seemed a part. Another peculiarity dis- 

 tinguished the sacred seat which my uncle used once a week 

 to occupy. On those occasions he preached literally and im- 

 mediately from under the ivy, of which a very large branch, 

 having forced itself an entrance through the massive wall of 



O U 



the church, ran along the interior till it reached the pulpit, 

 high over which it formed a leafy canopy of deep glittering 

 During the service of that Christmas morning (by me 

 * This is actually the case in the church of Climping, Sussex. 



