“There’s now and then a good streak about the old gal. Maybe she gets it from the Church,—the ark she calls it. Anyhow, I’ll speak to Carson to-day about the plan. I couldn’t please three wimmen folks better.” He answered the letter at once, and said: “MISS JERUSHA PEPPER:—Well done, good and faithful servant. Many daughters have done well, but you excel them all. Three cheers and a tiger for you. “P.S.—I ain’t thinkin’ particularly about my depraved condition, but I _am_ thinkin’ of building a chapel for you to enjoy religion in, when you come to visit Edna. “PHILIP OVERTON.” Uncle Phil _did_ see Carson, as he proposed doing; and as a result of the conference, a delegation of the leading men in the Unitarian Church called upon him the next morning, to know if it was true that he had abjured their faith, and was going to be confirmed at St. Jude’s, and build a church in Rocky Point, and pay the minister himself. They had heard all this, and a great deal more; and unwilling to lose so profitable and prominent a member from their own numbers, they came to expostulate and reason with him, and if necessary use harsher and severer language,—which they did before they were through with him. For Uncle Phil owned to the chapel arrangement, and said he thought it well enough for a man of his years to be thinking about leaving behind him some monument by which he should be remembered; otherwise, who would think of the old codger, Phil Overton, three months after he was dead. Then Squire Gardiner suggested that their own church needed repairing, and that a new and handsome organ would be quite as fitting a monument, and do quite as much toward wafting one to heaven as the building of an Episcopal chapel, and introducing into their midst an entirely new element, which would make fools of all the young people, and set the girls to making crosses and working altar-cloths. For his part, he would advise Mr. Overton to think twice, before committing himself to such folly. Uncle Phil replied that “he didn’t want any advice,—he knew his own business; and as to repairing the church, he wouldn’t say but what he would give as much toward that as anybody else; but he’d ‘be _darned_’ if he’d buy an organ for them to fight over, as to who should or shouldn’t play it, and how much they should have a Sunday. A choir was a confounded nuisance, anyway,—always in hot water, and he didn’t mean to have any in his chapel. No, sir! he’d have _boys_, as they did over to St. Jude’s.” “Ha, a Ritualist, hey?” and one of the number drew back from him, as if he had had the small-pox, asking how long since he had become a convert to that faith, and when he met with a change? Uncle Phil told him it was “none of his business;” and after a few more earnest words, said, “the whole posse might go to thunder, and he would build as many churches as he pleased, and run ’em _ritual_, if he wanted to, for all of anybody.”