CHAPTER XVI.
THE STRANGE ODOUR IN OLD ST. DUNSTAN’S CHURCH.
About this time, and while the incidents of our most strange and eventful narrative were taking place, the pious frequenters of old St. Dunstan’s church began to perceive a strange and most abominable odour throughout that sacred edifice. It was in vain that old women who came to hear the sermons, although they were too deaf to catch a third part of them, brought smelling bottles and other means of stifling their noses; still that dreadful charnel-house sort of smell would make itself most painfully and most disagreeably apparent. And the Rev. Joseph Stillingport, who was the regular preacher, smelt it in the pulpit; and had been seen to sneeze in the midst of a most pious discourse indeed, and to hold to his pious mouth a handk
