A new furnace followed the new chimney, in due course, and as a sense of comfort grew, there was opportunity to notice the lack of beauty. Twice in sixty years had some well-to-do summer parishioner painted the interior of the church at his own expense; but although the roof had been many times reshingled, it had always persisted in leaking, so that the ceiling and walls were disfigured by unsightly spots and stains and streaks. The question of shingling was tacitly felt to be outside the feminine domain, but as there were five women to one man in the church membership, the feminine domain was frequently obliged to extend its limits into the hitherto unknown. Matters of tarring and waterproofing were discussed in and out of season, and the very school-children imbibed knowledge concerning lapping, over-lapping, and cross-lapping, and first and second quality of cedar shingles. Miss Lobelia Brewster, who had a rooted distrust of anything done by mere man, created strife by remarking that she could have stopped the leak in the belfry tower with her red flannel petticoat better than the Milltown man with his new-fangled rubber sheeting, and that the last shingling could have been more thoroughly done by a “female infant babe”; whereupon the person criticized retorted that he wished Miss Lobelia Brewster had a few infant babes to “put on the job he'd like to see 'em try.” Meantime several male members of the congregation, who at one time or another had sat on the roof during the hottest of the dog-days to see that shingling operations were conscientiously and skillfully performed, were very pessimistic as to any satisfactory result ever being achieved. “The angle of the roof--what they call the 'pitch'--they say that that's always been wrong,” announced the secretary of the Dorcas in a business session. “Is it that kind of pitch that the Bible says you can't touch without being defiled? If not, I vote that we unshingle the roof and alter the pitch!” This proposal came from a sister named Maria Sharp, who had valiantly offered the year before to move the smoky chimney with her own hands, if the “menfolks” would n't.