"There I go again--an' in the House of God itself! Oh! 'tis a case with me! I've a heart o' stone--a heart o' stone." He turned and brushed his rusty hat with his coat-cuff.
Suddenly he faced round again.

"Here, Bill Udy," he said to the old labourer who had just come down the ladder, "catch hold of my hat an' carry en fore to porch.

I keep forgettin' I'm in church, an' then on he goes." The building stood half a mile from the sea, surrounded by the rolling towans and rabbit burrows, and a few lichen-spotted tombstones slanting inland.

Early in the seventeenth century a London merchant had been shipwrecked on the coast below Nannizabuloe and cast ashore, the one saved out of thirty.

He asked to be shown a church in which to give thanks for his preservation, and the people led him to a ruin bedded in the sands.