"Did that good father never read of a place where a drop of water could not be found to cool a certain person's tongue?" says she. "If not, your paternal ancestor fell short of his duty. It is no wonder his child should have gone half through life without a ray of saving grace, and with a white feather in her hat." Sisters, I was riled. "Half through life," says I. "Madam, do you know how old I am?" She looked at me half a minute, with all the eyes in her head; then, with the cool air of a woman counting money, said, "about for--" Sisters, I _cannot_ repeat the audacious falsehood of that creature's calculation. It was enough to rile up venom in the heart of a born cherubim. If ever a fiend took the disguise of a sugar-scoop bonnet, I have encountered one. A heart of stone lay under the innocent folds of that muslin half-shawl. "Madam," said I, with a look of overpowering indignation, "you must have begun and ended your arithmetic in multiplication. Take off half of the years you have mentioned." The woman smiled so knowingly, that I longed to-- Well, no matter, she smiled, and says she: "At any rate, you are not too old for the mercy-seat." "I should think not," says I. "Look yonder." I looked at half a dozen children jumping, kneeling, praying, and singing before the revival tent, which had been so full of worrying noises all night long, that none of us had got a wink of sleep. "Look," says she; "unless you are born again, and become like one of these, there will be no chance that you will ever enter the kingdom of Heaven." I looked at the lovely children, and I looked at her. "Excuse me," says I, "the object don't seem quite equal to the trouble. I have no notion of going backward in my life. In the first place I was too handsome a baby in the beginning to hanker after a change, and since then--I say nothing; but really, I have seen a good many people that claim to have been born again, and, so far as I can judge, they don't look a mite better, or a day younger, after taking all the trouble, which is discouraging." "Discouraging!" said the woman; "why, you are talking of regeneration! Come--come with me to the anxious-seat--hundreds are flocking there now." "Excuse me," says I, "if you please. Crabs may change their shells, and snakes creep out of their skins--I rather think they do sometimes--but born-again females look so much like the old pattern, that it don't seem to me worth trying after one is grown up." "Many an older person than you are has been born again," says she. "You don't say so," says I, a-fanning myself with a palm-leaf, for every drop of blood in my body grew hot when she talked about my age, and I was mad enough to bite a tenpenny nail in two with my front teeth.