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In the dark windows where the little lamps glowed gently, in the shadows, in the figure of the old monk sitting at the church door with a collecting-box, there was such unruffled peace that the princess felt moved to tears. Outside the gate, in the walk between the wall and the birch-trees where there were benches, it was quite evening. The air grew rapidly darker and darker.
The pilgrims carried a staff, a gourd hung at the belt, and they chanted psalms in a plaintive voice: one came from the Ukraine, another from the Yellow sea, and a third from the Finland provinces. This last, who was an aged man, carried at his waist a little padlocked collecting-box, as if it had been hung at a church door.
They gave up worrying Ministers and Parliament and took to worrying their own sympathisers and supporters for funds. The ballot- box was temporarily forgotten in the cult of the collecting-box.
I sauntered forth with cutlass and collecting-box, careless whither I went, and careless of what I saw; for everything that I could see would be worth seeing. I know not that I found many rare or new things that day.
We had started, after an early breakfast in the boat, and left my uncle there to finish off the drying of some skins ready for packing in a light case of split bamboo which the carpenter had made; and with one gun over my shoulder, a botanist's collecting-box for choice birds, and Pete following with another gun and a net for large birds slung over his shoulder, we had tramped on for hours, thinking nothing of the heat and the sun-rays which flashed off the surface of the clear shallow stream we were following, for the air came down fresh and invigorating from the mountains.
The young lady in the bureau said she would inquire, and Ann Veronica, while she affected to read the appeal on a hospital collecting-box upon the bureau counter, had a disagreeable sense of being surveyed from behind by a small, whiskered gentleman in a frock-coat, who came out of the inner office and into the hall among a number of equally observant green porters to look at her and her bags.
He was elderly and bald, with small pig-eyes, grey side-whiskers, and for mouth a hard square slit much like that of the collecting-box by the gate. A long pendulous nose came down over it and almost met an upthrust lower jaw. He wore a clerical suit, with a dingy white neck-tie; the skin about his throat hung in deep folds, and the folds were filled with an unpleasing grey stubble.
As we toiled on where the rocks rose like walls on either side, and the ground was stony and bare, the rugged glittering in the sunshine, Pete had got on a few yards ahead through my having paused to transfer a gorgeous golden-green beetle to our collecting-box.
"Only I have my lanterrne and collecting-box, and come down the river to catch specimens of the beautiful moth for the naturalists at home in France. I land from my boat, and the boat come to take me away; but your sentry man re-fuse to let me go." "Collecting lantern!" said the Captain. "Yes, sir. Look. I fear my beautiful specimens are spoiled in the pannier here. He use me very bad."
I suppose that is about a shilling per head from the members of our congregations. Of this congregation there are many that never give us a farthing, except, perhaps, the smallest coin in their pockets when the collecting-box comes round. I do not suppose that there is one of us that applies the underlying principle in our text, of giving God our best, to this work. I am not going to urge you.
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