"Well," said my father, "here, hanging up, is the church key; go and see what it is."
"I go and see!" exclaimed Pengelly, staggering backwards. "I dursn't do it. What would Susan say?"
Susan was his wife.
So my father sent me. I confess to having felt nervous. I took the key and went to the church, the coachman hanging at a respectful distance behind. There, sure enough, was a faint light shining through the windows. I admit that my heart beat rather flutteringly as I ascended the avenue leading to the porch and when, looking over my shoulder, I saw Pengelly very leisurely and uncertainly mounting the steps at the churchyard gate. However, I turned the key in the lock, threw open the door and went in. Then the mystery was solved. My cousin Emily at the Rectory had been having a choir-practice that evening, and had forgotten to extinguish the candle at the organ. This had burnt down till now the flame was capering, blue in tinge, above the last drops of molten wax.
At that moment I looked back, and saw the face of Pengelly, ghastly with fear and with the light from the expiring candle, peering in at the church doorway—afraid to enter, till I gave the word that all was right.
But even then superstition was dying out. I scooped out a turnip, cut holes in it for eyes, nostrils and mouth, inserted a candle and put it on a flat grave-stone, and waited in concealment to ascertain what effect it would have on passers-by. Presently an old woman went past the churchyard gate, halted, looked at the illumined turnip, calmly mounted the graveyard steps, removed the candle, and threw the turnip over the hedge. "Pity to waste a candle," said she. I was disappointed with the result of my experiment on old women's nerves.
A remarkable expression employed by our Devon folk for the publication of the banns of marriage is "Throwing out of the pulpit." I never heard of banns being announced anywhere except from the reading-desk, after the Second Lesson, but possibly it may have been so done in Puritan times, when the pulpit was all-in-all, and when, as one learns from the correspondence of Dean Grenville, the Puritans, instead of visiting the sick, read out the Visitation Service from the pulpit to the hale congregation.
