"It was beautiful, sir. One young lord 'e preached, another young lord 'e prayed, and another young lord 'e sang; it were trewly 'eavingly." Quashie would, I think, have been more impressed by three "Reverends." He invests the lowest of low clerics, whether that gentleman will or no, with mysterious attributes. He has inherited from his African ancestors an intense conviction of the existence of malignant demons, who take an uncanny interest in the affairs of individuals. He is never sorry to obtain assistance from any quarter in combating them. But neither "the Reverend" nor the "gubnah self" can keep Quashie out of the grip of the Obeahman. The witch-doctor, despite the cat-o'-nine tails, still plies his unpleasant trade. The basis of his power is the negro tendency to ascribe every indisposition to the evil eye. "Somebody put a wish upon me," says Cesarina, if ever so slightly afflicted. Pompey suffers from a bad swelling, and he sneaks away to the Obeahman, who makes his incantations over the sufferer, and to the latter's horrified amazement extracts, apparently from the inflamed spot, a frog or an old tooth, and then gravely assures his patient that he will soon be all right now. But Pompey does not doubt that the evil was done him by an enemy.

Grave scandal arose during one portion of my term of residence in our sunland city, because of riotous proceedings that went on nightly round a certain cottage. A Mapushi woman had left her friends in their "benabs " in a lonely forest glade of the Essequibo, to live in the colonial capital with a negro. He was not a good specimen of his name and race. He ill-used and beat the slender and shapely daughter of the woods and streams. She endured it all for awhile and then fled to the "bush" and her friends. But when once more in her father's home, she bethought her of revenge. Perhaps she went to the Quiaha, the nymph of the creek source. At any rate, she secured the assistance of some spook of power. Almost immediately Quashie, generally, in our city was aware of the fact. It came about in this wise. Cries, ear-piercing, and in other respects terrible, began to issue in the evening from the cottage of the bad black man. No believer in Obeah ever fails to put two and two together pretty quickly in such a case. That a diabolic spectre was in that humble dwelling was clear, and the spiritually weatherwise hastened to make it votive offerings. They brought it, therefore, gifts of rum and of schiedam, of whisky and of beer. They laid vessels full of more or less generous liquor on the window-sills, and then respectfully retired. The curious thing was that the spirit from the backwoods consumed these gifts as rapidly as they were presented to

him, his shricks growing distinctly more appalling with every act of homage, till, at last, a dead silence within the cottage proclaimed the fact that for that night, at least, he was appeased. This dramatic performance was kept up for some time. The nuisance, however,. became so great that the police were at last obliged to interfere, with this result, that the bad black man was ignominiously carried off to. durance vile.

Above all, as I have in some sort indicated, Quashie is imitative. If you walked behind the sable bucks of our city, when they were taking their walks abroad on Sunday, dressed as smartly as any London tradesman on his way to meeting, you would find no variety of "side" wanting, from the strictly dignified gait to the more selfassertive swagger. You will feel sure that you have met those young people before farther north, that is to say, before you note their faces. My black servant Pluto mimicked myself to perfection. I was for a long while unaware of this lèse-majesté, till one day a friend pointed him out to me with the remark : "There you go," and then I had an answer to the Burnsian prayer as far as the outer man was concerned :

O wad some Power the giftie gie us

To see ourselves as others see us.

It was exquisitely comic, the more so that Pluto appeared most blissfully unconscious of holding the mirror up to nature. It was a very close likeness, with just a soupçon of the caricature about it.

Quashie, by the way, is by no means so indisposed for activity as he is for steady continuous work. The latter he is inclined to regard as no very great advance on old-time slavery; but he is ready enough to bestir himself in games. He is addicted to cricket, and revels in football; he does not grow easily wearied in the dance. Cook going for a holiday in the country, will beg her mistress to make her a cap that she may worthily disport herself at lawn tennis. With a cheery refrain, such as " Fanderanderango," making vocal the river reaches, and waking distant echoes in the recesses of the forest, Quashie will bend right lustily to the labouring oar, and send the boat spinning along.

Then our sable friend of the sunlands is not without pluck. See him in the handsome and striking uniform of the West India regiments, and you will think him fit to go anywhere. Heaven alone knows what would become of the Portuguese of our city were it not for the Pax Britannica; they would be smitten hip and thigh. Quashie in his wrath is too much for the immigrants from Madeira. As to the coolies, that is another matter. They come to the Crown

colony from Madras, humble and fawning before a white man; but a short stay there seems to put independence and backbone into them, and when they have their hackia sticks handy, it is gare à qui me touche. A negro mob but recently repented of its intention of making an onslaught on the coolie quarter of Bourda, in face of the determined and belligerent attitude of the "mild" Hindoo; for the head of Quashie, thick though it is, has been known to crack in response to the smartly administered rap of the coolie cudgel. Still, take him all in all, he is the most warlike human animal of the sunlands. Drilled, and disciplined, and with his blood fairly up, he would be a formidable foe for the best troops in the world. After all, it is matter for congratulation that Quashie is an Englishman, that he has not the faintest desire to be a Russian, or a Prussian, or an Italian. As for the outwandered Lusitanians, why Quashie would prefer to remain a "nigger." "You call me nigger !" I heard him say on one occasion to one of the race he hates, "wha' den you think yo'self, you only a Portuguee!" This incident, by the way, reminds that west country boys at the beginning of the century, when playing a "rough and tumble " game, used to shout to each other:

One Frenchman beat two Portuguee,

One jolly Englishman lick 'em all three.

With Quashie frequently in my thoughts, I saw him once again in the winter of my year of home coming, and under sad circumstances. A night of wildest storm had enveloped the Isles of Lyonnesse. When morning broke, all the shores of that bay, which stretches round from Bloomy Hill to Peninnis, were strewn with wreckage. Some forlorn argosy of the seas had been dashed against the granite rocks, rolled and tumbled, and splintered into matchwood. I was on the beach of Porthcressa, when a pilot said to me, "One of 'em's come ashore." "Where is he?" I asked, and he indicated a wooden shed at the topmost verge of the sand. I went up and entered. There, stretched in death across the thwarts of one of those long slim "gigs" Scillonian boatmen affect, was a stalwart young negro of some twenty summers. He had made a strenuous struggle for life. At home in the water almost as much as on the land, he had possibly cherished the hope that he would breast the surges and reach the safe shore. He had reckoned without those long lines of breakers, those myriad cruel rock-crags of Porthcressa Bay. He had left the palm trees and those isles of beauty for this. It seemed such a pity, for, whatever Quashie's faults, the denizens of Quashiedom may be well content to stay at home.

FRANK BANFIELD.

IF

OLD CHURCH STEEPLES.

F we bear in mind the fact that our French neighbours use the word cloche for a bell, and clocher for a steeple, it may help to arrange the difference of opinion that prevails as to the application of the term steeple. Many persons consider that a steeple is a spire, whereas it is thus evident that it is the part of a church that contains the bells, whether it is capped with a spire or not. We have some further testimony on this subject in old accounts kept by churchwardens. In those that have been preserved at Ludlow, from the days of the Tudors, there are several entries that relate to the steeple of the church there. One states that an item of two-pence was paid for a key to the door that led up to the steeple, in 1545; another mentions twelve-pence paid for mending the "payne of glasse in the stiple"; another records that Thomas Season was paid ten-pence for going up into the steeple on two windy nights to save the glass in the windows there; again, there is an entry of twenty-pence paid for mending the "glasen wyndowis in the steple"; and there is another of six shillings paid for nine feet of new glass to the west window of the steeple. All of them show that a steeple was not a spire in those days. In the Welsh language a steeple is, literally, a bell-house, just as in the Italian it is campanile, or place for a campana, or bell. At the beginning of the last century Bailey describes a steeple as that part of a church where the bells are, and the belfry as that part of a steeple where the bells hang. By the time of the publication of Walker's dictionary, or the end of the last century, a much looser meaning was current. Walker gives the explanation that it was "a turret of a church generally furnished with bells." From this period of departure further confusion has crept in, and the term has been applied to towers and spires without distinction, and without any reference to bells.

Let us look at Cheddar, in Somersetshire, world-famous for its pure pale cheese. Here are high cliffs, with their stratification so marked as to look like the work of some gigantic masons; here are sloping hills, winding roads, green ferns scattered broadcast, as it

were, growing in every available chink in the wayside walls, and in every moist breadth of shadow; here are placid waters as well as dashing waterfalls; and in the centre of all, ever ripening, is the pleasant village with its open arcaded and canopied market cross, and its fine old church. The noble steeple of the latter rises in four stages above the doorway, whereof the highest contains the bells. There are two buttresses at each angle, which die into it at this uppermost stage to give place for the finials and turret with which the summit is finished. Throughout this part of the country we may see the counterpart of this steeple in nearly every village, for Somerset towers are all tall and square, with delicate open-work parapets, and with four finials at the angles, except when a tiny turret takes the place of one of them. And from them all, over the radiant country, Hannah More's country, floats out the mellow ring of the bells, "calling, calling." Even the superb tower of St. Mary Magdalene, Taunton, is like them, too, only size, grandeur, and sumptuousness are quadrupled; and, instead of finials at the angles, there are lofty pinnacles carrying crocketted spirelets, surmounted by vanes. The great wide west window of this magnificent edifice, and the large double-lighted windows of the four stages above it, are full of elegant open-work, which rises also into the parapet, and above that into the pinnacles, and then still rises up the spirelets till the narrowing space becomes too contracted to admit of more. the base of the parapet project gargoyles in the likeness of animals. Three angels with folded wings guard the west doorway, and midway across the openings of the two uppermost stages of the tower pass lines of angels bearing shields, transom-fashion. Niches, rich with tabernacular work, and bands of quatrefoil ornament in every wellconsidered position, still further enrich this stately pile. Many steeples in Gloucestershire present similar characteristics. In Wiltshire village churches, as at Westbury and Edington, octagonal stair turrets frequently rise from the ground to the summits of the steeples, which are generally finished with plain embrasured parapets.

At

In the eastern counties steeples are built of flint, like the churches to which they belong. Sometimes they have bands of stonework at intervals of their height, and always the "dressings " or outlines of the openings for windows and doorways, as well as the angles, are of stone. Cromer Church has a representative steeple. It is tall and square, and has buttresses at the angles, and four finials at the summit; and there are large window-openings at the topmost stage for the sound of the bells to pass out freely; but there the general