And probably this was true.

Anyhow, Mop had, very obviously, never bowed a note of church- music from his birth; he never once sat in the gallery of Mellstock church where the others had tuned their venerable psalmody so many hundreds of times; had never, in all likelihood, entered a church at all.
All were devil's tunes in his repertory.

'He could no more play the Wold Hundredth to his true time than he could play the brazen serpent,' the tranter would say.

(The brazen serpent was supposed in Mellstock to be a musical instrument particularly hard to blow.) Occasionally Mop could produce the aforesaid moving effect upon the souls of grown-up persons, especially young women of fragile and responsive organization.

Such an one was Car'line Aspent.