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The Communion-rails and pulpit are of oak, and the font of white marble of a peculiarly graceful design. Outside in the south-east corner of the churchyard is Sir Hans Sloane's monument. It is a funeral urn of white marble, standing under a canopy supported by pillars of Portland stone. Four serpents twine round the urn, and the whole forms a striking, though not a beautiful, group.
A few benches placed next to one another represented the communion-rails; and there they practised the whole afternoon: with studied piety, their hands folded and their heads bowed, they learnt how to genuflect, how to rise, how to approach in ranks and return at a sign from the old nun, who tapped with a key on the arm of her chair each time that a new row of youngsters had to start, kneel or go back.
The walls were striped with equally bizarre coloring, half Moorish and half Indian. A few hangings of dyed and painted cloths with heavy fringes were disposed on either side of the chancel, like the flaps of a wigwam; and the aboriginal suggestion was further repeated in a quantity of colored beads and sea-shells that decked the communion-rails.
But leave not being given by Authority as was expected, it was again brought back to the Tower, and buried by the side of Kilmarnock and Balmerino, close to the Communion-rails in the little church of St. Peter-on-the-Green, where so much Royal and Noble Dust doth moulder away. Memorandum.
The pulpit and reading-desk, both of carved oak and of a tulip shape, were placed in front of the communion-rails, on a spacious platform ascended by three steps this, the steps, and the aisles of the church were carpeted with beautiful Kidderminster carpeting.
It was during the Sunday morning service in the cathedral that I saw my friend, who had been dead for two years, sitting inside the communion-rails. I was so much astonished at the flesh-and blood appearance of the figure that I took off my glasses and wiped them with my handkerchief, at the same time looking away from him down the church.
Polwhele had picked her way across the churchyard, and after chatting a bit with my grandfather over the theft of his tools, had stepped into the church to see that the place, and especially the table and communion-rails and the parsonage pew, was neat and dusted, this being her regular custom after a trip to Plymouth.
My conjecture had been correct; the strangers had slipped in before us, and they now stood by the vault of the Rochesters, their backs toward us, viewing through the rails the old time-stained marble tomb, where a kneeling angel guarded the remains of Damer de Rochester, slain at Marston Moor in the time of the civil wars, and of Elizabeth his wife. Our place was taken at the communion-rails.
'And to think that men are still seeking scrolls in Turkestan to prove The sentence did not finish itself in his mind; a ray of western light falling across the altar steps in the stillness of the church awakened a remembrance in him of the music that Nora's hands drew from the harmonium, and, leaning against the Communion-rails, he allowed the music to absorb him.
Thus it happened that one fine morning, when the doors of the church were naturally open for ventilation, and the singing birds fluttered in and alighted on the tie-beams of the roof, there was a marriage-service at the communion-rails, which hardly a soul knew of.
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