When I was a small boy at the beginning of the century [the 1800s], I remember an old man who wore knee-breeches and worsted stockings... his name was Pontifex.... Mr. Pontifex was a carpenter by trade... He had built the organ in the church with his own hands, and made a smaller one which he kept in his own house. He could play as much as he could draw, not very well according to professional standards, but much better than could have been expected...

[About Mrs. Pontifex] How well do I remember her parlour half-filled with the organ which her husband had built... Mr. Pontifex would play to us upon the organ, and we would stand round him open-mouthed and think him the most wonderfully clever man that ever was born, except, of course, our papa... He built two organs and could play the Minuet in Samson on one and the March in Scipio on the other...

[About visitors] Two regulations only they must attend to; they must wipe their shoes well on coming into the house, and they must not overfeed Mr. Pontifex's organ with wind, nor take the pipes out.

[About Ernest, a young relation, the book's central character] There was no boy in the school as fond of music as he was. He picked up his knowledge, he said, from the organist at St. Michael's Church, who used to practise sometimes on a week-day afternoon. Ernest had heard the organ booming away as he was passing outside the church, and had sneaked inside and up to the organ loft. In the course of time the organist became accustomed to him as a familiar visitant, and the pair became friends.

[Alathea, Mr Pontifex's grand-daughter and Ernest's aunt, takes an interest in Ernest, who must decide how to occupy his time] Whatever it was to be, it must be something which he would like as much as other boys liked cricket or football... ere long it occurred to her that she might enlist his love of music on her side, and asked him one day when he was spending a half-holiday at her house whether he would like her to buy him an organ for him to play on. Of course the boy said yes; then she told him about her grandfather and the organs he had built. It had never entered his head that he could make one, but when he gathered from what his aunt had said that this was not out of the question, he rose as eagerly to the bait as she could have desired, and wanted to begin learning to saw and plane so that he might make the wooden pipes at once....
Alathea thought it would save trouble in the end if she told her brother and sister-in-law of this scheme. 'I do not suppose,' she wrote, 'that Dr. Skinner [Ernest's headmaster] will approve very cordially of my attempt to introduce organ-building into the curriculum at Roughborough, but I will see what I can do with him, for I have set my heart on owning an organ built by Ernest's own hands, which he may play on as much as he likes while it remains in my house and which I will lend him permanently as soon as he gets one of his own, but which is to be my property for the present, inasmuch as I mean to pay for it.'

[Ernest's mother, Christina, grudgingly accepts Alathea's scheme] Christina's mind wandered to the organ itself; she seemed to have made it with her own hands; there would be no other in England to compare with it for combined sweetness and power. She already heard the famous Dr. Walmisley of Cambridge mistaking it for a Father Smith. It would come, no doubt, in reality to Battersby Church, which wanted an organ, for it must be all nonsense about Alathea's wishing to keep it, and Ernest would not have a house of his own for ever so many years, and they could never have it at the Rectory. Oh, no! Battersby Church was the only proper place for it.
Of course they would have a grand opening, and the Bishop would come down... and Dr. Wesley or Dr. Walmisley, who should preside (it did not much matter which), would say to her, 'My dear Mrs. Pontifex, I never yet played upon so remarkable an instrument.'
[The instrument is begun but not finished]

[Later, when Ernest is despondent] There was only one place where he was happy, and that was in the old church of St. Michael, when his friend the organist was practising. About this time cheap editions of the great oratorios began to appear, and Ernest got them all as soon as they were published; he would sometimes sell a school-book to a second-hand dealer, and buy a number or two of the 'Messiah', or the 'Creation', or 'Elijah,' with the proceeds... Sometimes the organist would go home, leaving his keys with Ernest, so that he could play by himself and lock up the organ and the church in time to get back for calling over. At other times, while his friend was playing, he would wander round the church, looking at the monuments and the old stained-glass windows, enchanted as regards both ears and eyes, at once.

[The time comes for Ernest to leave school] Having still a short time to spare, he got the keys of St. Michael's church and went to have a farewell practise on the organ, which he could now play fairly well. He walked up and down the aisle for a while in a meditative mood, and then, settling down to the organ, played 'They loathed to drink of the river' about six times over, after which he felt more composed and happier; then, tearing himself away from the instrument he loved so well, he hurried to the station.

[Ernest eventually ends up in prison] A few days after he had left the infirmary the chaplain came to his cell and told him that the prisoner who played the organ in chapel had just finished his sentence and was leaving the prison; he therefore offered the post to Ernest, who he already knew played the organ. Ernest was at first in doubt whether it would be right for him to assist at religious services more than he was actually compelled to do, but the pleasure of playing the organ, and the privileges which the post involved, made him see excellent reasons for not riding consistency to death... By becoming organist he was saved from the treadmill, for which the doctor had said he was unfit as yet... he was allowed...two hours a day in the afternoon for practice. From that moment his prison life ceased to be monotonous...