TOPICS OF THE DAY.

Press, Volume LII, Issue 9181, 12 August 1895, Page 4

TOPICS OF THE DAY.

I The air is thick with re. 7 Reminiscences miniscences. There never of was a time when the : Fifty Years. public displayed more interest in the thought. E and memories of men of a previous r generation, aud this taste naturally 3 leads to the publication of volume } after volume of reminiscences, some t of which deserve honoured * places on f one's bookshelves, while others only testify j to the vanity of their authors. Among the former class must be rankod the recollecl tious of fitty years by the Rev. Harry 3 Jones, Prebendary of St. Paul's Cathedral, 3 whose long career as a clergyman has been a almost entirely spent in various parts of Loudon, and who has much that is both amusing and instructive to tell. In his time Mr Jones has preached before all sorts " of congregations, from, those of Stepney to St. J George's, Hanover Square, from an asylum to the Queen's Chapel at Windsor. Of all s his efforts, he tells us, that of preaching in • an asylum was the most embarrassing. - The chaplain told him, before he began, that f he must noc be surprised at the organ r breaking out the moment he had ended his B sermon, it was to stop or cover the 1 whistling, which sometimes began then. 7 He had previously begged him not to say t anything "exciting." Mr Jones, therefore, t choae an old sermon, and delivered it with c careful monotony, and the congregation torebore to whistle. What moßt attracted the preacher's attention was the dreadful inpenetrable gaze with which some who sat near the pulpit stared past him while he was speak.ng, Next to lunatics he had found paupers the most trying to address. While he was curate at the West End Z Church the Crimean War began, and he , notes that it was soon touching to see sudden patches of black appear in its bright J fashionable audience. The same occurred y in the time of tbe Indian Mutiny. c —-_ c Prebendary Jones' first care Cholera was St. Luke-, Berwick :- Stories, street, which is the most densely populated parish in ,_ London, containing a population, of about c 10.000 souls, in a space roughly estimated .. at 300 yards square. It had a reputation ~ for uuhealthiness which teems to have been t fully deserved. Some years before, the g source of an outbreak of cholera waa found j to be a street pump in the parish. The ._ water being cool, and "sparkling with , questionable gas," the pump was a popular one, and several hundred people died from cholera within 150 yards of the church. In later years, when Mr Jones occupied another London church, there were rumours of J cholera in the air, and he did all he could to prevent, his parishioners from using imJ pure water. " There was a pump in the '!? churchyard," he says, " at which, for all I " could say, they insisted on Ailing their pails G and jug*, till I hupe* a placard on it } T with this inscription, ' Dead Men's i- Broth.' Then I watched the arrival of -, disobedient souls, who paused to read d my notice, and retired with empty buckets. c During the first cholera panic : Mr Jones c thinks it probable that some people were i, buried alive. He cites, as a narrow es.ape, h I the case of a woman, for whose corpse the

mortuary cart was coming. A neighbour however, obtained leave to rub the b.d' with mustard, and under this stimulus th» supposed dead woman sat up, and ia afte 't years Mr Jones baptised four of her cbil ' dren. There was also the case of a man who had been given up, but, on whose bare back tho doctor, as a last resource Jaid „ napkin soaked in spirits of wine, The man's sister, through nervousness, managed to set this napkin ou fire with a candle she wtu holding. The effect of this alarming accident was that it roused up the patient, wb eventually recovered. One of the drawbacks to a Some London clergj man's Vot^ of a which Mr Jones evidently Ministers feels most keenly is the Experiences, fact that on the death of a member of his Church whom he has visited perhaps through a lon. illuess, :he funeral takes place in a suburban cemetery, and the last service is said over the body by a weary chaplain who can have no personal sympathy with the mourners. The work of these cemetery chaplains i a indeed of the most depressing character " What can you feel," said one once," when you have to read the solemn burial chaptet twenty times iv a day to people you hay? never seen before?' " Lately,"says MrJones " I officiated at one of these 'interments* and of course asked the chaplain on duty lor leave to do so. Poor man, he was waiting in the vestry, reading a yellow novel. * Leave, indeed,' he said. ' I have got to do it eight times more this afteruoon.' On that occasiou, as I walked before a weeping procession by the aide of the head-sexton, he asked mc to guess how many times he had looked into a grave. I gruffly declined. The question was put aa if had been an entertaining mortuary riddle—and he answered it himself— * Up. wards of 30,000.' * Many of your family ?' 1 enquired. ' Not one,' he replied ;-1 have officiated iv this place for years, aud brought up eight children, who are all doing well. They were, every one of them, born here.'" But marriages form a considerable portion of an East End clergyman's duties. At th. church of St. George's in the East a Chinamau, followed by a criticising crowd, ones brought an English bride to the altar. He had but a fragmentary knowledge uf Euglishi and Mr Jones got a friend who had Eastern experience to perform the ceremony. "On another occasion," he says, " the friends of the lady came to mc saying that the marriage would be forbidden at the last moment and warned mc agaiust the bridegroom as a notorious pugilist, who would be likely to resent (professionally) any hesitation on my part. He was of middle age, while his projected wife, a simple girl, had numbered ouly fifteen years. So, when the agitated wedding party had entered the church, I sent for him into the vestry, and (keeping a broad table between us) told him plainly my miud, having arranged meanwhile to send the bride away. He waa so surprise I at this unexpected collapse of his projsct that he adopted only a (slight) verbal

remonstrance, and departed (happily for mc) with his fists in his pockets." Ths Queen, we learn from these gossipy pages, takes a great interest in her poor subject* in the East End, and on more than one occasion when Mr Jones was workiug among them he received gifts of money from her Majesty to be spent in relieving such sufferers as he knew of.