“But I tell you what ’tis, gals,” he said, as he sat with them inside the church, which he had been showing them, “if there’s anything makes a chap feel like cussin’, it’s buildin’ a meetin’ house, and seein’ to it yourself; not that I do swear right out loud,” he added, as he saw Edna’s look of surprise. “I hold on till I git the hiccups, and feel at my stomach some, as I do when you two are haulin’ me over, only not quite so—so—tural-lural, you know; first, thar’s the Orthodox pitchin’ into me, and the Unitarians, who kind of claim me, you know; and then, if you’ll b’leeve it, the Second Adventists held some meetin’s in the school-house, and pitched right and left into my poor little chapel; called it one of the _ten horns_, and a _ritual_, and the Lord knows what; but the wust of all was the divinity chap from New York, who came out here, and preached a spell last winter; sort of a candidate, though he sniffed high at the idee, and said he’d never stoop to that. He preached in the Town Hall, and Ruth Gardner came up from New York, where she spent a month, with her head fuller of jimcracks than brains, and she jined the Episcopals, and helped run the machine, and rolled her eyes up till you could see nothin’ but the whites, and got after the minister, and set to callin’ him ‘Father,’ when, bless my soul, he wasn’t a half-a-dozen years older than she! And between ’em they raised the very old Harry with their processions, and boys dressed like girls, and flags, and crossin’s, and curtcheys, which they called _Jenny_-something, and the land knows what they didn’t do or would have done if I hadn’t raised a row, and said they could do what they liked in the Town Hall, and go to the old driver with their flummeries, but in _my_ synagogue I’d have no such carryin’s on. I was a miserable enough sinner, and was willin’ to own it, and had done a lot of things I didn’t orto have done, and when I went to meetin’, I wanted to hear now an’ then a word about that Man who died over on Calvary a good many years ago, and not all about _the church_, _the church_, and the _fathers_, and the _medival_ age. You orto have seen how the priest and Ruth Gardner looked at me when I got right up in meetin’ and spoke my piece, for, I vum, I couldn’t stan it when they give the bread and wine first to widder Jones’s two little boys, the wust scamps in town, who rob gardens, and orchards, and birds’-nests in the summer, and who, only the day before, had broke my gate, and denied it up hill and down. I couldn’t keep still no how, and freed my mind and quit, and the next day the priest and Ruth called on me,—he in his long frock coat, and she with a chain and cross as long as my arm, I’ll bet. They as’t me what I _did_ believe, and I said I believed the Creed, word for word; and the Bible, and the Prayer-Book; and more than all the rest, I believed in the Man that died; and I knew He never had any such goin’s on in that