“The synagogue is getting along slowly,” he wrote, “for the _cusses_—” (he erased that word as hardly consistent for a man who was running a church, and substituted “cattle,” so that it read) “the _cattle_ are on another strike, what hain’t gone over to work on the Unitarian meetin’ house, which is havin’ the greatest kind of overhaulin’ inside and out. The persuasion meets now in the Academy, and go it kind of ritual, with the litany and some of the _sams_, which they read slower than time in the primmer. Ruth Gardner leads off, and is getting up another carouse to buy a _Fount_ to dip the young ones in, and expects to catch the new minister. But let ’em run. Old Phil don’t ask no odds of Unitarian nor Orthodox, nor nobody else. He’ll build his own church and pay his own minister, if necessary, and burn _innocence_ too, if he wants to. “I send a letter from Roy, I guess, and it has done some travellin’, too, having gone first to that remarkable woman, your Aunt Jerushy, who wrote to me as follows: “‘Philip Overton, forward the enclosed to Edna, and oblige, Jerusha Amanda Pepper.’ “Short and sweet, wasn’t it? but like the old gal, as you described her. If Maude is there, tell her I am real hungry for a sight of her blue eyes and sassy face. Come up here, both of you, as soon as you can. Yours to command, “PHILIP OVERTON.” This was Uncle Phil’s letter, and Edna cried over it a little, and knew just how lonely the old man was without her, and half wished she had not left him, “though it would have been dreadful never to have known Roy at all,” she said to herself, as she opened next Aunt Jerusha’s letter, in which Roy’s was enclosed, and read what that worthy woman had to say. There was a good deal about her “neurology,” and a sure cure she had found for it, and about the new rector, who was as much too _low_ as the other had been too _high_, inasmuch as he went to the Methodist prayer-meetings and took a part in them, and said he wasn’t quite sure about the direct line down from the Apostles; it might be straight enough, but he guessed it had been broken a few times, and had some knots in it where it was mended, and he fully indorsed young Tyng, and believed in Henry Ward Beecher and Woman’s Rights, all of which she considered worse than turning your back to the people, and bowing to the floor in the creed, and so latterly she had staid at home and read the Bible and Prayer-Book by herself, and sung a hymn and psalm, and felt she was worshipping God quite as well as if she had gone to church and been mad as fury all the time. She hoped Edna felt better now she was at Leighton, though she was a big fool for going, and a bigger one if she staid there after that woman with a boy’s name came as my lady.