“If it were not for the cursed bore of keeping up the farce beyond the possibility of keeping up the fun, such a rig as this would be incomparably pleasant; but”--yawning--“that's the devil! I get monstrous tired of a joke that needs dry nursing!” Such were the last muttered words of Parson Stevens before he yielded himself up to his slumbers. Good young man--charitable old ladies--gullible enough, if not charitable! But the professions need such people, and we must not quarrel with them! CHAPTER VIII. PAROCHIAL PERFORMANCES. The poor, conceited blackguards of this ungracious earth have a fancy that there must be huge confusion and a mighty bobbery in nature, corresponding with that which is for ever going on in their own little spheres. If we have a toothache, we look for a change of weather; our rheumatism is a sure sign that God has made his arrangements to give us a slapping rain; and, should the white bull or the brown heifer die, look out for hail, or thunderstorm, at least, as a forerunner of the event. Nothing less can possibly console or satisfy us for such a most unaccountable, not to say unnatural and unwarrantable, a dispensation. The poets have ministered largely to this vanity on the part of mankind. Shakspere is constantly at it, and Ben Jonson, and all the dramatists. Not a butcher, in the whole long line of the butchering Caesars, from Augustus down, but, according to them, died in a sort of gloom glory, resulting from the explosion of innumerable stars and rockets, and the apparitions of as many comets! “Gorgons, and hydras, and chimeras dire,” invariably announce the coming stroke of fate; and five or seven moons of a night have suddenly arisen to warn some miserable sublunarian that orders had been issued that there should be no moon for him that quarter, or, in military and more precise phrase, that he should have no “quarters” during that moon. Even our venerable and stern old puritan saint, Milton--he who was blessed with the blindness of his earthly eye, that he should be more perfectly enabled to contemplate the Deity within--has given way to this superstition when he subjects universal nature to an earthquake because Adam's wife followed the counsels of the snake.