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There were constant demands upon the treasury of the church; it required a vast outlay of money to maintain the splendour and elegance of the temple which held its head so high above many others; and there were large charities to be sustained, not to mention its rector's princely salary. The millionaire pewholder was a liberal giver.
Had a Grace Darling or a Florence Nightingale been known only as a sitter or pewholder in a congregation, they might have been deemed unfit for any work requiring courage, self-sacrifice, or perseverance. But these noble qualities were all the while in them.
Not a pewholder withdrew. There was no diminution in the active work of the church. Prayer meetings, Sabbath School, mission services continued as before. Even the finances did not suffer. It was naturally impracticable to keep up the high premiums on pews.
Whether he was the first tenant I am unable to say, but a gentleman bearing that name dwelt there during the latter part of the year 1816, and appears to have been a well-known citizen of Little York. In 1819 the tenant was a person named McKechnie, as to whom I have been unable to glean any information whatever beyond the bare fact that he was a pewholder in St. James's church.
Joshua struck up quite a friendship with this man and was taught all the tricks of the trade even to the warning that in drawing the portrait of a homely man it is not good policy to make a really homely picture. The best-paying pewholder in the Reverend Samuel Reynolds' church was a Mr. Craunch, whose picture had been made by the joint efforts of the strolling artist Warmell and young Reynolds.
As these pews were either oblong or square, were both large and small, painted and unpainted, and as each pewholder could exercise his own "tast or disresing" in the kind of wood he used in the formation of his pew, as well as in the style of finish, much diversity and incongruity of course resulted.
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