Free The Little White Horse by Elizabeth Goudge

peapod and the blue sky above rolling up like a scroll to let the angels down. But it wasn’t anything of that sort. It was only the Parson announcing the first hymn.
    But what a noise! She had thought Sir Benjamin had a powerful voice, but it was nothing to the Parson’s. And at first sight she had thought Sir Benjamin an odd-looking elderly gentleman, but in oddness he couldn’t hold a candle to the old man in the pulpit. Standing just below him, quite collected and demure again now, her muff still swinging on its chain, and her mittened hands holding her prayer-book, she looked straight up into his face andhe looked straight down into hers with a keen searching look rather like Sir Benjamin’s when they had first met. He gave a flashing smile, and she smiled back, and from that moment Maria Merryweather and the Parson of Silverydew were firm friends.
    But there was no doubt about it, he was a very extraordinary old man, more like a scarecrow than anything else. He was very tall and very thin, and he had a brown clean-shaven weatherbeaten face, fine and keen and proud, and beautifully shaped brown hands with very long fingers, and snow-white hair that nearly touched his shoulders. He wore a black cassock and white bands beneath his chin.
    He must have been very old, yet the dark eyes beneath his bushy white eyebrows flashed fire, and his voice — well, for power and volume it was enough to waken the dead. It was wonderfully clear-cut and articulate too, with just the faintest trace of some foreign intonation that gave it charm and originality. He gesticulated with his hands when he spoke, so that they seemed speaking too.
    ‘Now then, good people of Silverydew,’ he cried, his flashing eyes passing over the packed congregation, ‘with all your hearts and souls and voices sing praises.’ Then he raised his head and glanced at the choir in the gallery. ‘And you up there, keep in tune for the love of God.’
    Then he suddenly whisked up a fiddle from somewhere inside the pulpit, tucked it under his chin, raised his right arm with the bow clasped in his thin brown fingers, brought it down upon the strings with superb artistry, and swung his people into the winging splendour of the Old Hundredth, with something of the dash and fire of a cavalry officer leading his men to the charge.
    What a row! Up in the gallery the fiddlers and the cellists and Digweed played like men possessed. Though she could not see them, Maria could picture their red perspiring faces, and their arms sawing back and forth, and their shining eyes almost popping out of their headswith eagerness and joy. And every man and woman and child in the congregation was singing at the top of his or her voice.
    Maria herself sang till her throat ached, with Sir Benjamin upon one side of her bellowing like a foghorn and Miss Heliotrope upon the other trilling like a nightingale. Miss Heliotrope’s trilling astonished Maria. She had never heard Miss Heliotrope trill before. She hadn’t even known she could trill.
    And it seemed to Maria, her imagination running riot to a shocking extent, that beyond the walls of the church she could hear all the birds in the valley singing, and the flowers singing, and the sheep and deer and rabbits singing in the park and woods and fields, and up on the slopes of the great hills. And somewhere the waves of the sea that she had not seen yet were rolling into Merryweather Bay, and crying Amen as they broke upon the shore.
    And up there in the tall pulpit stood the Parson playing the fiddle as Maria had never heard a fiddle played before, and never would again, because no one in all the world ever had, or ever would, play the fiddle as superbly as the Parson of Silverydew.
    The hymn ended and, with a soft rustling of Sunday skirts and petticoats and a creaking at the seams of Sunday coats that were a bit too tight, the congregation sank upon its knees, with the Old Parson, laying aside his violin and standing very straight with