THE GREAT DEAD.

Sun (Christchurch), Volume I, Issue 110, 15 June 1914, Page 5

THE GREAT DEAD.

SOLEMN CEREMONY IN ST. PAUL'S.

Death lias been busy during the past 12 months among the distinguished servants of the Empire who are members of the Order of St. Michael and St. George (says an English, exchange). At the annual service held recently—St. George's Day—in the beautiful little chapel of St. Paul's Cathedral, the Gentleman Usher of the Blue Rod read out a death roll containing no fewer than 40 names, perhaps the most famous being those of Lord Strathcona and Lord Minto, and the most unexpected that of Menelik, "Emperor of Ethiopia. '' So small is the chapel that the Knights and Companions overflowed into the Cathedral nave, forming a lake of scarlet and gold there. Light came from a high pearl-grey window, with the figure of a praying knight in one corner, and from two tall candles burning on the altar. A GROUP IN BLACK. Six ladders, full 20ft high, ranged at intervals round the chapel, looked oddly discordant, but they played a necessary part in the central act of the service. The roll of departed members had been read, and the choir had sung very sweetly "The Saints of God! their conflict passed,'' when a little group in black—women and children and two young men—moved from the nave into the chapel and stood with bowed heads just below the praying knight in the window. They were the relatives of the six Knights Grand Cross, recently dead, whose banners were to be removed from above their stalls.

Magnificently vested in a cope of blue and gold, Bishop Montgomery, Prelate of the Order, received the banners (a trifle dusty with the years) and laid them one by one upon the altar while the band of the Coldstream Guards played the solemn music of Mackenzie's '' Benedictus." The crimson lion couchant of Lord Wolseley came first, and one of the last was Lord Strathcona's golden lion rampant. To watch unmoved this last symbolic lowering of the banners of the dead was beyond the power of more than one member of the group by the window. Then the shield was turned. Out crashed the opening bars of the March in "Scipio," and, forming procession, the Duke of Argyll and other officers of the Order, resplendent in their decorations, passed with swinging martial tread to the Chapel of St. Dunstan on the other side of the Cathedral, where the banners of two new Knights Grand Cross, Lord Inchcape and Sir William Garstin, had already been placed. Returning, they laid the banners on the altar steps, and the choir sang that noble admonitory Psalm of the man who leadeth an uncorrupt life, and doeth the thing that is right, and speaketh the truth from his heart. He that hath used no deceit in his tongue nor done evil to his neighbour, and hath not slandered his neighbour. He that setteth not by himself, but N is lowly in his own eyes. . . . NEW DECORATIONS.

Then, again, with the help of the ladders, the banners were placed in position above the newly-tenanted stalls. The King has just expressed approval of somewhat elaborate plans, involving an expenditure of £3OOO, for decorating the chapel in a manner more worthy of the dignity of the Order. A new canopied seat is to be provided for the Sovereign (probably directly facing the entrance to the chapel), together with an official seat for the Prelate within the sanctuary.