After a while, a Sabbath comes when everything is wrong in church: the air is impure, the furnaces fail in their work, and the eyes of the people are blinded with an unpleasant glare.

Everybody asks, "Where is our old sexton ?" Alas! he will never come again.

He has gone to join Obededom and Berechiah, the doorkeepers of the ancient ark.

He will never again take the dusting; whisk from the closet under the church stairs, for it is now with him "Dust to dust." The bell he so often rang takes up its saddest tolling for him who used to pull it, and the minister goes into his disordered and unswept pulpit, and finds the Bible upside down as he takes it up to read his text in Psalms, 84th chapter and 10th verse: "I had rather be a doorkeeper in the house of my God than to dwell in the tents of wickedness!".